Generative AI illustration in The New Yorker is generating questions

The illustration for The New YorkerThe profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is scary. Altman wears a blue sweater with a blank expression. Around his head hovers a group of disembodied faces—creepy Alt-Altmans, their expressions ranging from anger to open-mouthed woe. Some barely resemble Altman. One last face rests in his hands. And at the bottom, there’s information that might scare many illustrators even more: “Visual by David Szauder; generated using AI.”

Szauder is a multimedia artist who has worked for over a decade with collage, video, and generative art processes that predate commercial AI tools, most recently teaching art and technology at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Here, his work builds on the sly strangeness of Altman’s two (or more) faces. Pained expressions on faces and a strange smoothing of movements communicate the central thesis that Altman cannot be trusted. There’s a painterly look to the image, rather than the sickly sheen typical of slop style, but the AI ​​origins are still unmistakable.

What does he say for The New Yorkerone of the most prestigious American magazines, to adopt generative AI? At its worst, the technology eliminates any discernible artistic process, flattening the creator’s intent – ​​this is a system for making pregnant videos of LeBron James and Italy’s Brainrot, not creations that rival the work of New Yorkers illustrators like Kadir Nelson, Christoph Niemann or Victo Ngai. In Szauder’s hands, it’s much more complicated: It’s one part of a longer creative process, which apparently includes programming his own AI tools and feeding them archival footage, like newspaper clippings and family photos.

Yet, in my opinion, this is still a lost opportunity. Human artists have designed creative parodies of AI filth, but the AI ​​lacks the self-awareness to parody itself, even with a human behind the wheel. The picture 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 contacted Szauder, although he didn’t specify what AI tools he was using, he explained the process of the piece in some detail. There is usually a sketching stage before providing final images. The New YorkerAviva Michaelov, digital design director, says Szauder sent about 15 different sketches to senior art director Supriya Kalidas, including the one that ultimately led to the final Hydra-esque supernatural monstrosity that can be seen above the article. In an email to us, Szauder writes:

“For the basic structure of the final image, I had a clear idea of how I wanted to position the character and their heads. So the AI functioned even more as a tool than usual, especially since much of the work focused on shaping faces, heads, portraits, through a combination of classic editing methods (Photoshop, if you want to call it) and AI-based editing. The results were often imperfect or imperfect, which required manual correction and refinement. We spent considerable time refining the facial expressions, while also developing multiple clothing variations and adjusting the lighting several times to arrive at the final image.

According to a 2025 article on Szauder from Whitehot Magazinehe “succeeded in designing his own coding system and programming software to generate images based on a particular prompt or stock images that he feeds into his design.” He also seems concerned about the moral dilemma of traditional AI image generation, using “ethically clarified sources”.

As Szauder explained to us: “I firmly 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 much deeper human touch than most AI-generated work. The ensloppification of newsrooms has been well documented by others Edge writers. The industry’s top journalists have either 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 using AI in illustration is reliably a cortisol spike for most illustrators. This is not the first time that a renowned publication has ventured into AI. It’s not the first time either The New Yorker commissioned David Szauder to create an AI-animated illustration.

Here at The edgeWe have a strict policy on the use of AI-generated images. We put a yellow label on any image we publish that was generated with AI, and every time we use AI image generation to help create an image, it is disclosed, loudly and with clear justification. (Disclosure: Our parent company, Vox Media, has an agreement with OpenAI.)

In many cases, generated images – especially those created solely from text prompts, probably the most common method – remove the creative process that makes art human. Input from a text field has only a limited effect on the output, to the point that AI-generated images created in this way cannot be copyrighted. According to a U.S. Copyright Office guideline on legal authorship of AI-generated images: “No matter how many times a prompt is revised and resubmitted, the end result reflects the user’s acceptance of the AI ​​system’s interpretation, rather than authorship of the expression it contains.” »

An artist’s eye is informed by a lifetime spent gathering an internal library of tastes, senses, and intentions, none of which are possessed by tools like Midjourney or ChatGPT. The results of picture prompts are often like someone describing a dream: It’s fascinating when your brain puts it together, but telling another person about your surreal vision of making out with your therapist before all your teeth turn to dust and disintegrate, and their eyes glaze over until the topic returns to the weather. A dream is worth something (aside from an awkward Zoom call with your therapist) when a human being makes the effort to translate it into a work of art – it’s not just the idea but the process that makes it compelling.

Meanwhile, even though we don’t know the statistics on editorial illustrators, AI is definitely stealing art jobs. Some illustrators therefore completely forgo these tools. Others have found them useful for staying afloat in a difficult field, like illustrators experimenting with powering their own work through AI image generators or more practical applications like using the AI-powered “remove background” tool in Photoshop. Arts budgets are often the first crunch for an editorial publication in the throes of a death spiral that bleeds revenue. Freelancing is so atomized that it is functionally impossible to unionize, and illustration is a profession already rife with exploitation, with rates in a race to the bottom. As a former independent artist, I’m not here to judge David Szauder for his process – which, again, seems much more complex than that of the average AI image maker.

But there’s still the question of whether Altman’s article – which uses the visual aesthetic of weird job-stealing AI slop to illustrate a Ronan Farrow article about the Dark Prince of job-stealing and weird AI slop – works. Szauder is doing what countless AI advocates have been calling for: using it as part of a broader artistic toolkit to convey an idea. What are the results?

While I think it fundamentally succeeds in communicating the story, the final image feels like an attempt at meta-commentary that thematically fails. If you weren’t familiar with the telltale signs in AI images, you might miss this comment entirely. While the image is an eye-opener to the origin of AI for me and the rest of our art team, it lacks any of the more stylistic aspects of some of Szauder’s other work, letting the central visual metaphor do the heavy lifting of the idea, and giving the whole thing a sickly but slightly boring vibe.

The inconsistent likeness across all the faces (something a portrait illustrator could have controlled) is also indicative of the AI’s limitations, and the studio’s synthetic backdrop environment makes the whole thing look like a Lifetouch elementary school photo. The murky intentionality and bland presentation create more questions for the viewer than it tells the story of the many faces of Sam Altman.

On the other hand, the other New Yorkers the piece feels like it comes from more interesting sources. It’s more cinematic, and the undulating texture of the pit’s colorful walls echoes the early days of AI, when the end results were even more chaotic and unpredictable.

I don’t want to tell anyone working in a field as precarious as freelance editorial illustration what they’re supposed to think about AI. The decision to hire Szauder to illustrate The New Yorker It doesn’t scare me, personally. This is a much more reasoned editorial decision than the “best writing, anywhere” publication filling its negative space with shrimp Jesus and all that. Inviting AI images into the pages of a world-renowned publication is definitely a slippery slope, one that could be seen as normalizing the use of AI in the illustration industry. But The New Yorker did not create this problem, nor did it single-handedly create the conditions of uncertainty that illustrators faced long before we faced the AI ​​generation. Just like the rabbit hole in Szauder’s first film New Yorkers Image of AI, they stumble like the rest of us.