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.”