The Verge has called out The New Yorker for illustrating its profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman with AI-generated art, describing the result as unsettling and visually incoherent — a cluster of distorted, disembodied faces arranged around the subject in ways that human illustrators would simply never choose.
The decision deserves more scrutiny than it might initially appear to warrant, because The New Yorker is not just any publication. It is arguably the American magazine most associated with the craft of commissioned illustration. Its covers and interior art have, for more than a century, represented a specific editorial philosophy: that visual journalism is journalism, that the hand of a skilled artist adds meaning rather than merely decoration, and that the relationship between image and subject should be deliberate. To deploy AI image generation in a profile of the man whose company is most responsible for accelerating that technology into the mainstream is a choice loaded with implications, whether the editors intended those implications or not.
The broader context here is a publishing industry under severe financial strain. Staff illustrators are increasingly rare. Commissioning rates for freelance artists have stagnated or declined for years even as the cost of everything else has risen. Into that gap, AI image generation arrived with an obvious commercial pitch: faster, cheaper, infinitely revisable. For a business-side editor looking at a line item, the temptation is not hard to understand. What is harder to understand is the editorial logic, particularly at an institution whose brand rests so heavily on the prestige of its visual identity.
There is also a specific irony problem that publications seem to keep underestimating. The story of AI's rise is, among other things, a story about what happens to creative workers when their labor is automated or devalued. Illustrators, alongside writers, voice actors, musicians and visual artists, are among the groups most directly threatened by the current wave of generative tools. Using those tools to illustrate coverage of the very executives building them sends a signal — probably unintentional, but a signal nonetheless — about where the publication stands in that dispute. The likely reading, for many working artists, will not be charitable.
The specific aesthetic failure The Verge describes is worth dwelling on, because it is not incidental. AI image generators are trained to produce outputs that look statistically plausible given their prompts, not outputs that communicate a coherent editorial idea. A human illustrator given the brief of portraying Sam Altman would make choices — about posture, expression, symbolic framing, color temperature — that reflect a point of view about the subject. The disembodied faces and blank expressions The Verge describes suggest a system filling visual space according to pattern-matching logic rather than editorial intent. The result reads as noise dressed up as meaning, which is a particular problem in a context where the image is supposed to deepen the reader's understanding of a complicated and consequential figure.
The consequences of moments like this tend to ripple in a few directions simultaneously. For working illustrators, each high-profile instance of a prestigious outlet using AI art normalizes the practice and weakens the argument that editorial illustration has a protected cultural value. For the outlets themselves, the short-term cost saving arrives with a longer-term brand risk that is difficult to quantify until it is too late. The New Yorker's visual identity is a competitive asset in a media environment where most competitors have none; eroding it for marginal production savings is a trade that may look different in five years than it does in a quarterly budget review.
For the AI industry, and for figures like Altman specifically, this kind of episode cuts in an ambiguous direction. On one hand, it demonstrates adoption at the highest levels of cultural prestige. On the other, it produces exactly the sort of visible, criticizable failure mode that critics use to argue the technology is not ready — or not appropriate — for contexts requiring genuine judgment and craft.
What to watch for next is whether The New Yorker responds publicly to the criticism, and if so, how it frames the decision. A transparent accounting of why AI illustration was chosen in this specific instance would at least clarify whether this was an intentional editorial experiment, a production shortcut, or something that slipped through without adequate review. The distinction matters. Also worth watching is whether other legacy publications with strong visual traditions — magazines that built reader loyalty partly on the back of commissioned art — begin making similar choices quietly, and whether the creative community develops more organized pressure in response. The current criticism tends to be episodic and outlet-specific. At some point, this suggestion is, it will likely become something more structural.
