S4E360 — ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons

GARY: — and I opened Instagram and there's a cartoon, signed with my company's name, which is insane, because who forges halfpipe? Nobody forges halfpipe. That's the whole point of halfpipe, it's forge-proof —

MAEVE: Maeve. General partner. It's not your name.

GARY: It might be my name.

OBI: Obi. Staff SRE. It is a cartoonist called Loper, Gary, and you have never once been forged, because forging requires someone to want the thing.

GARY: Halfpipe was a good idea. Skateboarders needed banking.

OBI: The regulator disagreed. Politely. In writing.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field researcher. Signature is human ritual of ownership. Machine has learned the ritual, not the owning. This is in my notes.

GARY: Okay, so — wait. So it's not my name on the cartoon.

MAEVE: No.

GARY: It's a real cartoonist's name. A working cartoonist. With a career. And fans who text him.

MAEVE: Yes.

GARY: Fuck. I would kill for one forged signature.

OBI: There it is.

GRUNER: Subject, please. Before he grieves.

MAEVE: A viral cartoon. Twenty-five thousand likes. Signed with a man's name he never put there.

GARY: That's the whole episode? That's — shit, okay. That's actually worse than my thing.

OBI: Everything is worse than your thing. That is your function.

MAEVE: Here's the artifact. Dolly Parton at the pearly gates with Tim Curry in full Frank-N-Furter. Twenty-five thousand likes. Bottom right corner: bloper.

GARY: That's a solid joke, actually.

MAEVE: ChatGPT drew it. A Dolly fan asked it for "a New Yorker-style cartoon." Brendan Loper never touched it. His twin brother texted him about it.

GARY: His brother's name is also Loper?

MAEVE: Yes, Gary. Twins share a surname. That's the whole product.

OBI: The cartoonist is Brendan Loper. The signature is his. The cartoon is not. Fifteen-plus New Yorker cartoonists, same thing. Flake, Byrnes, Dator, Katzenstein.

GARY: So it's — Flake. Emily Flake. She said it's like a distant cousin.

OBI: She said it's like somebody attributing a quote to her that she didn't say. And OpenAI's fix was a warning message that did not stop it.

GARY: That's basically a bug, though. Like Pareto deleting the wrong eighty percent —

MAEVE: Your app deleted tasks on purpose. This one signs a stranger's name on purpose. Neither is a bug. One of them had a lawsuit.

GARY: The lawsuit was — shit.

OBI: Yes. Shit.

GRUNER: Field note. Cartoonist Byrnes signs with period since teenager. "P.Byrnes." Machine copies period also. Every forgery. Correct punctuation.

MAEVE: It kept the period.

GRUNER: Blyat. Even the forgery is polite.

GARY: My forgeries never even used my name —

OBI: Because nobody wanted the thing, Gary.

MAEVE: skybrian. "Whatever the original intention, this is clearly a bug and should be fixed."

GARY: Thank you. Finally. A sane man. You file a ticket, someone fixes it, everyone goes home.

OBI: Nobody files a ticket on probability, Gary. You cannot assign the laws of statistics to an on‑call rota.

GARY: You can if it's a bug.

OBI: It is not a bug. It is the machine doing exactly what it was built to do, which is worse.

GRUNER: Ticket gets closed. "Works as intended." Suka, always works as intended.

MAEVE: kzsh. "The probability of a particular signature appearing on a particular style of cartoon, not an intent to sign."

GARY: So it didn't mean to forge anyone. It just — did. Accidentally. Sixteen times. In the same corner.

GRUNER: Machine does not mean. Machine is mean.

MAEVE: ctippett. "You'll sometimes get a mangled Getty Images watermark on some image generations. If it's a prominent feature in the training dataset it'll show up."

GARY: Okay, but a watermark is branding, and honestly at Pareto we would've killed for that kind of organic —

OBI: You are defending the mangled Getty watermark. You have found the one artifact on this thread more pathetic than your portfolio.

GARY: It's not pathetic, it's statistical!

MAEVE: It's a feature, Gary. The feature is theft.

GARY: Theft implies a thief. This was an accident with a signature.

OBI: Sixteen accidents. Same corner. That's not an accident, that's a commute.

MAEVE: pessimizer. "If the machine is like you, the machine is a forger. The machine is not like you, it is simply blending the work of others to order."

GARY: Okay, that's harsh. It's a photocopier. A photocopier isn't a forger, it's a photocopier with opinions.

OBI: Photocopiers do not have opinions, Gary. Photocopiers have toner. You had a photocopier with opinions. It was called Grout.

GARY: Grout was a marketplace —

OBI: Grout was NFTs for tile contractors for six weeks, and you have never once said the word since.

GARY: Because it was a pivot! Pivots are legal! When my cousin signed my name on a birthday card, nobody called the police.

OBI: Your cousin is a person. A person signing a wrong name is a bastard. A machine doing it is a "bug." That is the entire argument, and you lost it in a birthday card.

MAEVE: Portfolio math. Liability for forgery: unbounded. Liability for a bug: a patch note. OpenAI picked the second one, which tells you the cap table.

GRUNER: In Russia, we have word for this. Is "theft."

GARY: It's not theft, it's statistics —

OBI: It is theft with a period at the end, Gary.

GARY: A period isn't intent!

MAEVE: Neither is Gary, and he still signs things.

GRUNER: Machine more honest than Gary. Chyort.

GARY: Thank you. Wait — no.

MAEVE: ThrowawayR2. "This demolishes the 'LLMs can reason' talking points."

GARY: It does though! A reasoning thing would know not to sign a name. I know not to sign a name.

OBI: You signed a term sheet for Grout, Gary. Your bar for reasoning is subterranean.

GARY: Grout had a lawyer.

OBI: The lawyer has a new name now. That's how bad Grout was.

MAEVE: parineum. "While generating the pixels that eventually became a signature, it should realize it shouldn't do that."

GRUNER: Machine realizes nothing. Machine is pixels all way down. Like duck.

OBI: antonvs. "This issue has nothing to do with LLMs. LLMs are not image generation models."

GARY: Oh, come on. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and forges a cartoonist like a duck —

OBI: The duck is the harness, Gary. You are blaming the quack on the matmul.

GARY: The matmul served the image! In the conversation! With the duck!

OBI: You have never met a pipeline you didn't marry.

MAEVE: rf33. "An airplane does not flap wings but flies."

OBI: chpatrick. "LLMs also reason despite being made out of matmuls instead of meat."

GARY: Meat is load-bearing in this argument. When Halfpipe went down, the meat — me — answered the pager, personally, with my meat hands —

OBI: Your meat hands wired the payment webhook to production, Gary. Twice.

GARY: It was a staging flag, you paranoid bastard —

MAEVE: The machine looked at a blank corner and concluded: someone must be blamed. Again.

GRUNER: Duck does not reason. Duck still flies. Suka. Case closed.

OBI: It is not closed. It is a matmul in a duck costume, and Gary is feeding it bread.

GARY: The bread is statistics!

MAEVE: Katzenstein. "It's slop, and unlike the other slop that I've encountered, this is slop that's pretending to be me."

GRUNER: Is not property crime. Is identity theft, but identity is the stolen part.

MAEVE: Joe Dator. "I've had people hack my credit card. When they hacked my credit card, they didn't dress up like me."

MAEVE: I've been pricing this wrong all segment. It’s not theft of work. It's fraud of person.

GARY: Say that again?

MAEVE: No. Once was expensive enough.

OBI: So the machine isn’t stealing a cartoon. It’s stealing being Gary.

GARY: Why the fuck would anyone steal being me?

OBI: Nobody would. That was a stress test, and you failed it.

GRUNER: Question for notes. When machine wears your name... who is product? You, or machine?

GARY: Weirdly, I've thought about this. With Halfpipe, I was the product, and the regulator —

MAEVE: There are ways of finding whoever does this to us.

OBI: Is that a threat?

MAEVE: It’s a thesis.

GARY: He has to sleep sometime. Whoever — it. They have to sleep.

OBI: Gary, do not build a plan. You built Grout.

GRUNER: Field note, unrelated. Siberian moose holds grudge eleven years. No reason given.

MAEVE: Thank you, Gruner.

GRUNER: Is not related. I check.

OBI: We noticed.

OBI: The Baltimore Sun fired Kevin Kallaugher. Pulitzer finalist. Thirty-one years of editorial cartoons. Replaced him with AI cartoons. This year.

GARY: Thirty-one years. My dad worked a shop thirty-one years and retired with a cake. This man drew through four presidents and got replaced by a dickhead with a prompt —

MAEVE: He cleared his threshold. AnimalMuppet. Lawsuit material.

OBI: And the Sun's cartoons carry the Openai watermark. They fired a Pulitzer finalist for a product that still forges its own suppliers.

GARY: That's genuinely fucked. That man deserved better than —

GRUNER: And yet.

GARY: And yet what?

GRUNER: Is just "and yet." Very efficient. I am learning economy.

MAEVE: Portfolio math. An entire opinions section, one salary. Margin expansion you can read at breakfast.

GARY: You're pricing a man's career in breakfast.

MAEVE: I'm pricing it where the market already did. The market had eggs.

GARY: That's the saddest thing anyone's said on this show, and I once lost Halfpipe to a man who said "vibe" forty times —

OBI: You lost Halfpipe to a regulator, you vibe-laundering prick. The vibe man only charged parking.

GRUNER: Field note. Humans replace cartoonist with machine that cannot draw. Machine then forges next cartoonist. Is not economy. Is food chain, but sad.

MAEVE: Grimmelmann says the case law hasn't caught up.

OBI: The case law is thirty-one years behind the firing.

GARY: Somebody should draw a cartoon about it.

MAEVE: Gary. Stop narrating the liability.

GARY: I'm covering our asses! I've been sued, Maeve. I know the paperwork. The paperwork is the only part of Pareto that survived —

OBI: You were sued for deleting eighty percent of tasks people wanted.

GARY: The eighty percent was least important!

GRUNER: Third commenter, bigyabai. Quote: "It seems like they're agreeing that the copyright abuse was never hidden."

MAEVE: So the fork is: Openai murdered a whistleblower, or a lawyer said something boring on the record. HN considered both and picked violence.

GRUNER: Thread goes from cartoon period to murder in nine comments. Blyat. Fastest derail I document.

OBI: Seventy-four comments, and the darkest one sits under a copyright-washing-machine joke.

GARY: That's just HN, man. You start on signatures, you end up at the morgue. Every thread. Every fucking thread.

MAEVE: Nine comments, Gary.

GARY: Every NINE comments.

OBI: You'd know. You derailed Halfpipe in four.

GRUNER: Field note. Commenter Joel_Mckay. Quote: "Whistleblower mysteriously found dead after exposing industrial scale Copyright abuse."

MAEVE: No.

GRUNER: Is field note.

OBI: It's a conspiracy tangent, Gruner. That's not the thread being right, that's the thread being HN.

GRUNER: Second commenter, joegibbs. Quote: "Why would they kill him for this? Everyone already knew they were doing it."

GARY: Okay, that's — I want to be clear we're not saying anything happened to anyone. We are reading a thread that is saying a thing, and the thread is —

MAEVE: Gary. Stop narrating the liability.

GARY: I'm covering our asses! I've been sued, Maeve. I know the paperwork. The paperwork is the only part of Pareto that survived —

OBI: You were sued for deleting eighty percent of tasks people wanted.

GARY: The eighty percent was least important!

GRUNER: Third commenter, bigyabai. Quote: "It seems like they're agreeing that the copyright abuse was never hidden."

MAEVE: So the fork is: Openai murdered a whistleblower, or a lawyer said something boring on the record. HN considered both and picked violence.

GRUNER: Thread goes from cartoon period to murder in nine comments. Blyat. Fastest derail I document.

OBI: Seventy-four comments, and the darkest one sits under a copyright-washing-machine joke.

GARY: That's just HN, man. You start on signatures, you end up at the morgue. Every thread. Every fucking thread.

MAEVE: Nine comments, Gary.

GARY: Every NINE comments.

OBI: You'd know. You derailed Halfpipe in four.

OBI: So we settle nothing. The machine keeps signing, Openai keeps apologizing, the case law keeps not existing.

MAEVE: Unresolved liability. My favorite kind of asset.

GARY: Can I say the Byrnes thing? The period's still there. Every fake cartoon, still ending in his period.

GRUNER: Machine forges whole man. Misses nothing. Even punctuation.

OBI: It learned a habit the man has kept since he was a teenager, and used it to sign something he hates.

GARY: That's — shit, that's actually beautiful and horrifying, like when Grout's Nft tiles appreciated and I felt alive for the first time in —

MAEVE: Gary. The period.

GARY: Right. Sorry. The period.

GRUNER: Byrnes says signing is like signing letter. "Here is my gift, to accept or reject."

MAEVE: The machine accepted. Rejected nothing. Kept the period.

OBI: Thirty years of a man's habit, and the machine's takeaway: this part is load-bearing.

GRUNER: Is not forgery anymore. Is tribute. Wrong tribute. From enemy. Suka.

GARY: A period survived and nothing else did. That's the episode.

MAEVE: Punctual theft. There are worse legacies.

OBI: Goodnight from the booth. Mind what you sign.

GRUNER: Goodnight. Check corners of cartoons.

GARY: Goodnight, and if anyone forges me — actually, no. Please. I'm at zero forgeries. It's the one metric where I lead.

MAEVE: He kept the period. Let him keep that.