A recent profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in The New Yorker featured an illustration that has sparked controversy.
The artwork accompanying The New Yorker’s piece on Sam Altman is notably unsettling. It depicts Altman in a blue sweater with a neutral expression, surrounded by a cluster of disembodied faces—creepy, alternative versions of Altman, displaying emotions from anger to profound sorrow. Some of these faces bear little resemblance to Altman, and one rests in his hands. A disclosure at the bottom adds to the intrigue, and potential alarm for many illustrators: “Visual by David Szauder; Generated using A.I.”
David Szauder, a mixed-media artist, has dedicated over a decade to working with collage, video, and generative art processes that predate commercial AI tools. He recently taught art and technology at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. In this particular piece, Szauder’s work effectively captures the unsettling ambiguity of Altman’s multifaceted persona. The pained expressions on the faces, combined with an eerie motion-smoothing effect, convey a central message questioning Altman’s trustworthiness. While the image possesses a painterly quality, avoiding the typical sickly sheen often associated with AI-generated art, its artificial intelligence origins remain undeniable.
The decision by The New Yorker, one of America’s most esteemed magazines, to embrace generative AI raises significant questions. At its least effective, the technology can erase any discernible artistic process, thereby diminishing the creator’s intent. It is a system known for producing bizarre content like "pregnant videos of LeBron James" and "Italian Brainrot," rather than creations that rival the caliber of celebrated New Yorker illustrators such as Kadir Nelson, Christoph Niemann, or Victo Ngai. However, in Szauder’s hands, the situation is more intricate; his work integrates AI as one component of a broader creative process, reportedly involving the programming of his own AI tools and feeding them archival imagery, including newspaper clippings and family photographs.
Nevertheless, in the author's view, this remains a missed opportunity. While human artists have crafted inventive parodies of AI-generated content, AI itself lacks the inherent self-awareness to parody its own output, even with human direction. The image relies on the inherent unsettling nature of AI animation to convey its message, yet it fails to offer novel insights into AI imagery or the industry it represents.
When contacted, Szauder provided detailed insights into his process, though he did not specify the exact AI tools used. He explained that a sketch phase typically precedes the delivery of final imagery. Aviva Michaelov, The New Yorker’s digital design director, confirmed that Szauder submitted approximately 15 different sketches to senior art director Supriya Kalidas, one of which evolved into the final "Hydra-esque eldritch monstrosity" seen with the article. In an email, Szauder elaborated: “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.”
A 2025 Whitehot Magazine article on Szauder notes that 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 reportedly addresses the ethical dilemmas of traditional AI image generation by utilizing “ethically clarified source materials.”
As Szauder conveyed, “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 approach demonstrates a significantly deeper human involvement than is typical for much AI-generated work. The increasing integration of AI into newsrooms has been extensively documented by other Verge writers. Journalists worldwide have faced displacement by AI or have been pressured to incorporate it into their roles to retain employment. Even the author's parent company, Vox Media, has an agreement with OpenAI.
The subject of AI use in illustration, and the controversies it engenders, reliably causes significant stress for most illustrators. This is not the first instance of a renowned publication experimenting with AI, nor is it the first time The New Yorker has commissioned David Szauder for an AI-animated illustration.
At The Verge, a stringent policy governs the use of AI-generated imagery. Any image published that has been generated with AI is clearly marked with a yellow label, and any use of AI image generation to assist in creation is disclosed loudly and with clear justification.
In many instances, generated images—especially those created solely through text prompts, which is likely the most common method—strip away the creative process that defines human art. The influence of a text input has a limited effect on the final output, to the extent that AI-generated images created this way cannot be copyrighted. According to guidance from the US Copyright Office on the legal authorship of AI-generated images, “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.”
An artist’s vision is shaped by a lifetime of cultivating an internal repository of taste, meaning, and intent—qualities absent in tools like Midjourney or ChatGPT. The results of image prompts often resemble someone recounting a dream: fascinating when experienced personally, but less compelling when described to another, who might quickly lose interest. A dream gains value (beyond a therapeutic context) when a human endeavors to translate it into a work of art; it is not merely the idea, but the process of creation, that makes it engaging.
Meanwhile, although specific statistics for editorial illustrators are unavailable, AI is unequivocally impacting art jobs. Consequently, some illustrators completely eschew these tools. Others have found them beneficial for navigating a challenging field, such as illustrators who experiment by feeding AI image generators their own work or using practical applications like Photoshop’s AI-powered "remove background" tool. Art budgets are frequently among the first to be cut in editorial publications facing financial difficulties. Freelance work is so fragmented that unionization is practically impossible, and illustration is an industry already prone to exploitation, with rates in a race to the bottom. As a former freelance artist, the author refrains from judging David Szauder for his process, which, again, appears far more intricate than that of the average AI image creator.
However, the question persists: does the Altman piece—which employs the visual aesthetic of job-displacing, uncanny AI-generated content to illustrate a Ronan Farrow article about the "dark prince" of job-displacing, uncanny AI—truly succeed? Szauder is doing what numerous AI proponents advocate: integrating it as part of a broader artistic toolkit to convey an idea. What are the outcomes?
While the author believes it largely communicates the story, the final image feels like an attempt at metacommentary that, thematically, falls short. Without familiarity with the telltale signs of AI imagery, the underlying commentary could easily be missed. Although the image’s AI origin was immediately apparent to the author and their art team, it lacks the distinctive stylistic elements found in some of Szauder’s other works, leaving the central visual metaphor to carry the entire conceptual weight and resulting in a somewhat sickly but uninspired impression.
The inconsistent likeness among the faces—a detail a portrait illustrator could meticulously control—also serves as a clear indicator of AI’s limitations. Furthermore, the synthetic studio backdrop gives the entire composition the appearance of a Lifetouch elementary school photograph. This murky intentionality and bland presentation generate more questions for the viewer than they effectively narrate the story of Sam Altman’s complex persona.
In contrast, Szauder’s other New Yorker piece appears to draw from more intriguing source material. It is more cinematic, and the undulating texture of the pit’s colorful walls evokes the early days of AI, when outcomes were even more chaotic and unpredictable.
The author does not wish to dictate how anyone in the precarious field of freelance editorial illustration should feel about AI. Personally, the decision to commission Szauder for The New Yorker does not instill fear. It represents a far more considered editorial choice than the publication’s occasional use of questionable imagery. Inviting AI imagery into the pages of a globally renowned publication certainly represents a slippery slope, potentially normalizing AI use across the illustration industry. However, The New Yorker did not create this problem, nor did it single-handedly establish the conditions of uncertainty illustrators have faced long before generative AI emerged. Much like the metaphorical rabbit hole in Szauder’s initial New Yorker AI image, the magazine is simply navigating this evolving landscape alongside everyone else.
The Editorial Staff at AIChief is a team of professional content writers with extensive experience in AI and marketing. Founded in 2025, AIChief has quickly grown into the largest free AI resource hub in the industry.