illustration for the new YorkerThe profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is shocking. Altman stands with a blank expression in a blue sweater. A group of disembodied faces hover around his head – creepy alt-altmen, their expressions ranging from anger to open-mouthed grief. Some barely resemble Altman. One last face is in his hand. And at the bottom, there’s a revelation that may further scare many illustrators: “Visualization by David Szouder; drawn using AI”
Szouder is a mixed-media artist who has been working with collage, video, and generative art processes for over a decade, predating commercial AI tools, and was most recently teaching art and technology at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Here, his work hinges on Altman’s strange awkwardness of two (or more)-facing. The pained expressions on faces and flashes of terrible motion smoothing drive home the central thesis that Altman can’t be trusted. Instead of the typical Slope-style sickly glow, there’s a painterly glint to the image, but the AI’s origins are still unmistakable.
why does it say the new YorkerWill one of America’s most prestigious magazines embrace generic AI? At its worst, the technology eliminates any discernible artistic process, thwarting the creator’s intent — it’s a system for producing pregnant videos of LeBron James and Italian Brainroot, not creations that rival their work. New Yorker Painters like Kadir Nelson, Christophe Niemann, or Victo Ngai. In Szauder’s hands, it’s far more complex: one piece of a longer creative process, which apparently involved programming his own AI tools and feeding them archival imagery like newspaper clippings and family photos.
Nevertheless, in my opinion, it is still a waste of opportunity. Human artists have produced creative parodies of AI sloppiness, but AI lacks the self-awareness necessary 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.
When we reached out to Szouder, although he didn’t reveal which AI tool he used, he did explain the process behind this piece in some detail. There is usually a sketch phase before any final imagination is presented. the new YorkerAviva Michalov, Digital Design Director, says that Szouder sent about 15 different sketches to senior art director Supriya Kalidas, including the sketch that ultimately led to the final Hydra-esque eldritch monstrosity, which can be seen at the top of the article. In an email to us, Szouder writes:
“For the base structure of the final image, I had a clear idea of how I wanted to position the character and his head. So the AI acted as even more of a tool than usual, especially since most of the work was focused on shaping the face, the head, the images through a combination of classical editing methods (Photoshop, if we want to call it that) and AI-based editing. The results were often incomplete or flawed, requiring manual corrections and refinements. We worked on the face as well as the development. Spent a lot of time refining the expressions, making many changes to the clothes and adjusting the lighting repeatedly to reach the final image.”
According to a 2025 article on Szauder whitehot magazineHe managed to “devise his own coding system and programming software to generate images based on a particular signal or archival image material, which he feeds into its design.” He also seems concerned with the ethical dilemma of traditional AI image generation using “ethically explicit source material”.
As Szauder explained to us, “I firmly believe that even in the age of AI, an image must first be created in the human brain, not in a machine.”
This is a much deeper human touch than AI-generated tasks. Slavery in newsrooms has been well documented by others the verge Author. Great journalists throughout 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 controversy) of the use of AI in illustration is a reliably cortisol spike for most illustrators. This is not the first time that a renowned publication has dabbled in AI. This isn’t the first time either the new Yorker has tasked David Szouder with creating the AI animated illustrations.
over here The VergeWe have a strict policy on the use of AI-generated imagery. We put a yellow label on any image we publish that was generated with AI, and this is disclosed loudly and with clear justification whenever we use AI image generation to assist in the creation of an image. (Disclosure: Our parent company, Vox Media, has an agreement with OpenAI.)
In many cases, generated images – especially those created entirely through textual cues, probably the most common method – take away the creation process that makes art human. Input from text fields has only so much influence on the output, to the extent that AI-generated images created in this way cannot be copyrighted. According to a guidance from the US Copyright Office on the legal authorship of AI-generated images, “No matter how many times a prompt is modified and resubmitted, the final output reflects the user’s acceptance of the AI system’s interpretation, not the authorship of the expression it contains.”
An artist’s vision comes from a lifetime of accumulating an internal library of taste, meaning, and intention, none of which tools like MidJourney or ChatGPT have. The results of image cues often feel like someone is describing a dream: It’s fascinating when your brain puts it together, but tell another person your surreal vision of having a relationship with your therapist before all your teeth turn to dust and disintegrate, and their eyes glaze over until the subject changes back to the weather. A dream becomes something meaningful (besides an awkward Zoom call with your therapist) when a human being attempts to translate it into a work of art – it’s not just the idea but the process that makes it compelling.
Meanwhile, although we don’t know the statistics for editorial illustrators, AI is definitely stealing art jobs. There are some painters who, as a result, reject these tools altogether. Others have found them helpful in sticking to tough terrain, like illustrators who experiment with feeding AI image generators their own work or more practical applications like using the AI-powered “Remove Background” tool in Photoshop. The arts budget is often the first belt to be tightened at an editorial publication in a revenue-hemorrhaging death throes. Freelance work is so widespread that forming a union is functionally impossible, and exemplifies a business already rife with exploitation, with rates racing downwards. As a former freelance artist, I’m not here to judge David Szouder for his process – which, again, seems far more involved than the average AI image maker.
But there’s still the question of whether Altman’s piece—which uses the visual aesthetic of a job-stealing, supernatural AI slope—works to illustrate Ronan Farrow’s article about the dark prince of job-stealing, the supernatural AI slope. Szauder is doing what countless AI proponents have been calling for: using it as part of a larger artistic toolbox to express an idea. What are the results?
Although I think it fundamentally succeeds in conveying the story, the final image feels like an attempt at metacommentary that fails thematically. If you weren’t familiar with the obvious signs of AI imagery, you might have missed that comment entirely. Although this image was a dead giveaway to me and the rest of our art team about AI origins, it has none of the more stylistic aspects of some of Szauder’s other works, leaving the central visual metaphor to do the heavy lifting of the idea, and giving the whole thing a sick but slightly boring vibe.
The inconsistent similarity across all faces (something that can be controlled for Portrait Illustrator) is also a dead giveaway to the limitations of AI, and the synthetic studio background environment makes the whole thing feel like a Lifetouch elementary school photo. The questionable intentions and dull presentation leave more questions for the audience than it does telling the story of Sam Altman’s many faces.
In contrast, Szauder is other New Yorker This piece seems to come from more interesting source material. It’s more cinematic, and the curved textures of the crater’s colorful walls are reminiscent of the early days of AI when the end results were even more chaotic and unpredictable.
I don’t want to tell anyone working in an uncertain field like freelance editorial illustration how they should feel about AI. The decision to hire Szauder for example the new Yorker Personally I am not afraid. This is a far more rational editorial decision than a “best writing, anywhere” publication filling its negative space with Shrimp Jesus and whatever nonsense. Inviting AI imagery into the pages of a world-renowned publication is certainly a slippery slope, and could be seen as normalizing the use of AI in the illustration industry. But the new Yorker It didn’t create the problem, and it didn’t single-handedly create the conditions of uncertainty that illustrators have faced long before we had General AI to contend with. Like Szauder’s first rabbit hole New Yorker AI Image, they’re disrupting it just like the rest of us.
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