Let’s talk about the cartoon that had a real artist’s name in the corner — and the fact that he never drew it.
Brendan Loper draws cartoons for The New Yorker. His pen name is BLOPER. He’s been signing it for years, the same way, in the same place, bottom corner, because that’s what you do when the work is yours.
Late August, Dolly Parton and Tim Curry died within days of each other. Somebody who was grieving made a cartoon about the two of them arriving at the pearly gates together, and posted it on Facebook, and it went everywhere. Twenty-five thousand likes on one repost. Facebook groups, Instagram, Bluesky, all of it.
And in the bottom corner of that cartoon was BLOPER.
Loper didn’t draw it. He didn’t sign it. A woman had asked ChatGPT for “a New Yorker-style cartoon” and posted what came back. The first he heard about it was a text from his twin brother, whose friend had seen the thing and wanted to know if it was his. Then emails. Then strangers in his DMs.
He told Nieman Lab, “It was very surreal.” And then something better than that. He said: “I’m not a territorial person, but my name is my name. It felt very much like a violation of my personhood.”
Andrew Deck at Nieman Lab went looking, and found it wasn’t one cartoon and one artist. More than fifteen New Yorker cartoonists, past and present, with their signatures and pen names sitting on machine-generated drawings. Harry Bliss. Emily Flake. Joe Dator. Pat Byrnes. Liza Donnelly. George Booth. Saul Steinberg, who’s been dead since 1999. Warren Miller, who was publishing in the sixties.
Pat Byrnes has signed “P.Byrnes” with a period at the end since he was a teenager. He calls it signing a letter. Every single AI cartoon carrying his name ended with the period.
Think about what had to be learned for that to happen. Not the joke. The joke’s incoherent — some of the punchlines don’t parse at all. Not the drawing either, not really; most of it looks like several different artists blended together. What got reproduced, with precision, is the one mark whose entire job is to say this came from my hand.
The model learned the part that makes a claim.
And here’s the part that should bother you more than the art. OpenAI was told. After Nieman Lab raised it, the chatbot started replying, “This prompt may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content.” And then, as of publication, it kept signing cartoons with the names of real cartoonists. OpenAI’s statement was that the future of creativity is fundamentally human, and that they appreciate the community flagging bugs and unintended behaviour.
A bug. The bug is the part that worked.
Now — the obvious read on this is copyright. Artists get scraped, artists get copied, artists get replaced. All true, and all of it has been said for three years. But copyright is the wrong frame here, and the lawyers will tell you why. Cornell’s James Grimmelmann makes the point plainly: attribution is a very small part of the fair use inquiry. If the model isn’t reproducing a specific drawing, it’s reproducing a style, and style has never been protected. The Sarah Andersen class action against Stability and Midjourney has been running since 2023 and doesn’t mention signatures at all.
So the thing that was taken — the name, the claim, the attribution — is the thing the law is least equipped to touch. The drawing is arguable. The name is almost unlitigated.
There’s one precedent that shows the shape of a fix. Getty sued Stability in the UK, largely lost on copyright, and won on trademark — because the model kept producing the Getty watermark. The mark that carries a commercial claim got protection. Not the picture. The mark.
Which brings me to what people are missing, and it isn’t about cartoonists.
The signature is the cheapest proof of authorship human beings ever invented. It costs nothing to apply, it takes a second, and for about six hundred years it worked because forging it was expensive. You needed a hand, a pen, the right slant, the right pressure, and the nerve to do it in front of someone. That gap — trivial to make, hard to fake — was the entire security model.
That gap is now zero.
And business runs on it. Every invoice you’ve ever been paid on. The letterhead. The PDF a supplier emails you with a signature at the bottom. The clinical note. The audit sign-off. The offer letter. The valuation report. The reason you accept any of those isn’t that they’re cryptographically sound. It’s that faking one used to require effort and a certain kind of criminal, and mostly nobody bothered.
Now a person with a free account and no skill can put your name on work you’d never approve of. Joe Dator said it better than I can — he’s had his credit card hacked, and he reckons this feels like more of a violation. “When they hacked my credit card,” he said, “they didn’t dress up like me.”
That’s the shift. Fraud used to steal from you. This one wears you.
Jason Adam Katzenstein called it “slop that’s pretending to be me.” Del Close used to say a joke is a compression of an idea. A signature is a compression of a person. That’s why losing it stings more than losing a file.
And notice it’s already out in the open and perfectly legal-looking. The Baltimore Sun has been running AI-generated cartoons in its opinion section this year — verifiable with OpenAI’s own watermark tool — under a house style, with bylines. Nobody’s hiding. The forgery isn’t a scandal, it’s a workflow.
So what do you actually do about it, because I’m not interested in a lament.
Move your proof off the mark and onto the process. A mark is a picture; anyone who can see it can draw it. What can’t be drawn is a record: a signed hash of the file, a timestamp that matches a version history, a provenance manifest that travels with the asset from the moment it was made. If your name is the only thing tying a deliverable to you, you have no proof. You have a texture.
Second thing. Make the counter-signature a human, not a logo. The reason a forged invoice works is that nobody calls. One phone call to a number you already have in your contacts collapses ninety percent of this. So put a name and a reachable person on everything you send, and build the habit of ringing it once on anything that moves money. Yes, it’s slower. That’s the point — speed was what we were buying with the signature, and the signature no longer buys it.
And third, if you’re building, this is a market with a date on it. Nobody has yet made “who actually made this” easy to check at the point of sale — for an agency deliverable, a piece of commissioned art, a report, a design file. Getty’s trademark win, the C2PA labelling push, the EU’s transparency obligations: the pieces exist. Nobody’s assembled them into something a small business can use without a lawyer. That gap is a product.
Loper’s own words are the spec, actually. He said: “The signature for me is the certificate of authenticity. I only put it on work that I’m putting on the internet that I feel needs to be recognized as from my hand.”
Recognized as from his hand. Not from his name. From his hand.
That’s what got taken, and no court is going to hand it back, because courts deal in copies and this is a copy of a claim.
A signature was never a picture of a name. It was a promise that a person could be asked. The machine can copy the picture. It cannot be asked.
So keep signing your work. Keep a record of the hand that made it, in a form a copier can’t reproduce. And when someone hands you a signed thing, don’t admire the mark. Ask who you can call.
You’ve got this.