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Your article about AI doesn’t need AI art
AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All AI Your article about AI doesn’t need AI art A New Yorker profile of Sam Altman was accompanied by controversial artwork. by Cath Virginia Close Cath Virginia Art Director Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Cath Virginia Apr 11, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC Link Share Gift Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, illustration by David Szauder for The New Yorker Cath Virginia Close Cath Virginia Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Cath Virginia is an art director at The Verge. The illustration for The New Yorker ’s profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a jump scare. Altman stands in a blue sweater with a blank expression. Around his head hovers a cluster of disembodied faces — creepy alt-Altmans, their expressions ranging from anger to open-mouthed woe. Some barely look like Altman. One final face rests in his hands. And at the bottom, there’s a disclosure that might spook many illustrators far more: “Visual by David Szauder; Generated using A.I.” Szauder is a mixed-media artist who has been working with collage, video, and generative art processes that predate commercial AI tools for over a decade, and was recently teaching art and technology at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Here, his work leans into the shifty uncanniness of Altman’s two (or more)-facedness. The pained-looking expressions on the faces and a gloss of eerie motion smoothing communicate the central thesis that Altman can’t be trusted. There’s a painterly look to the image, rather than the typical slop-style sickly sheen, but the AI origins are still unmistakable. What does it say for The New Yorker , one of America’s most prestigious magazines, to adopt generative AI? At its worst, the technology eliminates any discernable art process, flattening the creator’s intention — it’s a system for making pregnant videos 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 hands, it’s far more complicated: one piece of a longer creative process, which apparently includes programming his own AI tools and feeding them archival imagery, like newspaper clippings and family photos. Yet it’s still, in my opinion, a waste of an opportunity. Human artists have designed creative parodies of AI slop , but AI lacks the necessary self-awareness to parody itself, even with a human behind the wheel. The image relies on the unsettling nature of AI animation to tell its story without really saying anything new about AI imagery or the industry behind it all. When we reached out to Szauder, while he wasn’t specific about which AI tools he used, he did explain the process of the piece in some detail. There is usually a sketch stage prior to delivering any final imagery. The New Yorker ’s digital design director, Aviva Michaelov, says that Szauder sent around 15 different sketches to senior art director Supriya Kalidas, including the one that eventually led to the final Hydra-esque eldritch monstrosity that can be seen above the article. In an email 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 also seems concerned with the moral quandary of traditional AI image generation, using “ethically clarified source materials.” As Szauder explained 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 touch than goes into much AI-generated work. The ensloppification of newsrooms has been well documented by other Verge writers . Great journalists across the industry have been completely replaced by AI or told that, to keep their jobs, they have no choice but to find ways to use it. The topic ( and controversies ) of AI use in illustration is reliably a cortisol spike for most illustrators. It’s not the first time a renowned publication has dabbled in AI . I
- AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
- Follow Follow See All AI Your article about AI doesn’t need AI art A New Yorker profile of Sam Altman was accompanied by controversial artwork.
- by Cath Virginia Close Cath Virginia Art Director Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
- Follow Follow See All by Cath Virginia is an art director at The Verge.
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