The illustration for The New Yorker’s profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a leap scare. Altman stands in a blue sweater with a clean expression. Around his head hovers a cluster of disembodied faces — creepy alt-Altmans, their expressions starting from anger to open-mouthed woe. Some barely seem like Altman. One last face rests in his palms. And on the backside, there’s a disclosure which may spook many illustrators much more: “Visual by David Szauder; Generated using A.I.”
Szauder is a mixed-media artist who has been working with collage, video, and generative artwork processes that predate business AI instruments for over a decade, and was just lately educating artwork and know-how at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Here, his work leans into the shifty uncanniness of Altman’s two (or extra)-facedness. The pained-looking expressions on the faces and a gloss of eerie movement smoothing talk the central thesis that Altman can’t be trusted. There’s a painterly look to the picture, relatively than the everyday slop-style sickly sheen, however the AI origins are nonetheless unmistakable.
What does it say for The New Yorker, one in all America’s most prestigious magazines, to undertake generative AI? At its worst, the know-how eliminates any discernable artwork course of, flattening the creator’s intention — it’s a system for making pregnant movies of LeBron James and Italian Brainrot, not creations that rival the work of New Yorker illustrators like Kadir Nelson, Christoph Niemann, or Victo Ngai. In Szauder’s palms, it’s much more sophisticated: one piece of an extended inventive course of, which apparently consists of programming his personal AI instruments and feeding them archival imagery, like newspaper clippings and household photographs.
Yet it’s nonetheless, in my opinion, a waste of a possibility. Human artists have designed inventive parodies of AI slop, however AI lacks the mandatory self-awareness to parody itself, even with a human behind the wheel. The picture depends on the unsettling nature of AI animation to inform its story with out actually saying something new about AI imagery or the trade behind all of it.
When we reached out to Szauder, whereas he wasn’t particular about which AI instruments he used, he did clarify the method of the piece in some element. There is normally a sketch stage previous to delivering any last imagery. The New Yorker’s digital design director, Aviva Michaelov, says that Szauder despatched round 15 completely different sketches to senior artwork director Supriya Kalidas, together with the one which finally led to the ultimate Hydra-esque eldritch monstrosity that may be seen above the article. In an e mail to us, Szauder writes:
“For the base structure of the final image, I had a clear idea of how I wanted to position the character and its heads. So AI functioned even more as a tool than usual, especially since much of the work focused on shaping the faces, the heads, the portraits, through a combination of classical editing methods (Photoshop, if we want to name it) and AI-based editing. The results were often imperfect or flawed, which required manual correction and refinement. We spent considerable time refining facial expressions, while also developing multiple variations in clothing and repeatedly adjusting the lighting to arrive at the final image.”
According to a 2025 article on Szauder from Whitehot Magazine, he “managed to devise his own coding system and programming software to generate images based on a particular prompt or archival image materials he feeds into its design.” He additionally appears involved with the ethical quandary of conventional AI picture technology, utilizing “ethically clarified source materials.”
As Szauder defined to us, “I strongly believe that even in the age of AI, an image must first be formed in the human mind, not in the machine.”
This is a far deeper human contact than goes into a lot AI-generated work. The ensloppification of newsrooms has been properly documented by different Verge writers. Great journalists throughout the trade have been utterly changed by AI or advised that, to maintain their jobs, they don’t have any selection however to search out methods to make use of it.
The subject (and controversies) of AI use in illustration is reliably a cortisol spike for many illustrators. It’s not the primary time a famend publication has dabbled in AI. It’s additionally not the primary time The New Yorker has commissioned David Szauder to create an AI animated illustration.
Here at The Verge, we maintain a strict coverage on the usage of AI-generated imagery. We slap a yellow label on any picture we publish that’s been generated with AI, and any time we use AI picture technology to help with the creation of a picture it is disclosed, loudly, and with clear justification. (Disclosure: Our father or mother firm, Vox Media, has an settlement with OpenAI.)
In many circumstances, generated photographs — notably these created purely by means of textual content prompts, probably the commonest technique — strip out the creation course of that makes artwork human. The enter from a textual content subject solely has a lot impact on the output, to the purpose that AI-generated photographs created this manner can’t be copyrighted. According to a steerage from the US Copyright Office on the authorized authorship of AI-generated photographs, “No matter how many times a prompt is revised and resubmitted, the final output reflects the user’s acceptance of the AI system’s interpretation, rather than authorship of the expression it contains.”
The eye of an artist is knowledgeable by a lifetime of assembling an inner library of style, which means, and intent, none of that are possessed by instruments like Midjourney or ChatGPT. The outcomes of picture prompts typically really feel like any person describing a dream: It’s fascinating when your mind assembles it, however inform one other individual your surrealist imaginative and prescient about making out together with your therapist earlier than your whole tooth turned to mud and disintegrated, and their eyes glaze over till the topic modifications again to the climate. A dream turns into price one thing (exterior of a clumsy Zoom name together with your therapist) when a human being makes the hassle of translating it right into a murals — it’s not simply the concept however the course of that makes it compelling.
Meanwhile, though we don’t know the statistics for editorial illustrators, AI is positively stealing artwork jobs. There are some illustrators who, consequently, swear off these instruments altogether. Others have discovered them useful to remain afloat in a troublesome subject, like illustrators who experiment with feeding AI picture mills their very own work or extra sensible functions like utilizing the AI-powered “remove background” software in Photoshop. Art budgets are sometimes the primary belt tightened at an editorial publication in the throes of a revenue-bleeding demise spiral. Freelance work is so atomized that it’s functionally inconceivable to unionize, and illustration is a commerce that is already rife with exploitation, with charges in a race to the underside. As a former freelance artist, I’m not right here to evaluate David Szauder for his course of — which, once more, appears much more concerned than the common AI picture creator’s.
But there’s nonetheless the query of whether or not the Altman piece — which makes use of the visible aesthetic of job-stealing, uncanny AI slop as an example a Ronan Farrow article in regards to the darkish prince of job-stealing, uncanny AI slop — works. Szauder is doing what numerous AI proponents have been calling for: utilizing it as half of a bigger inventive toolbox to convey an thought. What are the outcomes?
Although I believe it mainly succeeds in speaking the story, the ultimate picture looks like an try at metacommentary that, thematically, falls flat. If you weren’t acquainted with the telltale indicators of AI imagery, you may miss that commentary altogether. Although the picture was a lifeless giveaway for AI origin to me and the remainder of our artwork group, it doesn’t possess any of the extra stylistic facets of a few of Szauder’s different work, leaving the central visible metaphor to do the concept’s heavy lifting, and giving the entire thing a sickly however barely boring vibe.
The inconsistent likeness on all the faces (one thing a portrait illustrator might’ve managed for) is additionally a lifeless giveaway for AI’s limitations, and the artificial studio backdrop surroundings makes the entire thing really feel like a Lifetouch elementary college photograph. The murky intentionality and bland presentation create extra questions for the viewer than they do inform the story of Sam Altman’s many faces.
By distinction, Szauder’s different New Yorker piece feels prefer it comes from extra fascinating supply materials. It’s extra cinematic, and the squirming texture of the pit’s colourful partitions echoes again to the early days of AI when the top outcomes have been much more chaotic and unpredictable.
I don’t wish to inform anybody who works in a subject as precarious as freelance editorial illustration how they’re presupposed to really feel about AI. The resolution to rent Szauder as an example for The New Yorker doesn’t scare me, personally. It’s a much more reasoned editorial resolution than the “best writing, anywhere” publication filling its destructive house with shrimp Jesuses and regardless of the fuck this is. Inviting AI imagery into the pages of a world-renowned publication is positively a slippery slope, and one which could possibly be seen as normalizing the usage of AI throughout the illustration trade. But The New Yorker didn’t create this downside, and it didn’t single-handedly create the circumstances of uncertainty illustrators have confronted since lengthy earlier than we had gen AI to take care of. Much just like the rabbit gap in Szauder’s first New Yorker AI picture, they’re stumbling down it identical to the remainder of us.