Simon Denny's AI Portraits Illustrate New York Magazine's Power Issue

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Berlin-based artist Simon Denny has been commissioned by New York Magazine to create AI-generated portraits for its latest“Power” issue. These works accompany the article“So Few People, So Much Influence,” which spotlights 26 AI engineers, founders, and thinkers described as having significant influence despite limited public recognition.

The featured individuals include Logan Graham of Anthropic, who focuses on testing AI models for potential threats like bioweapon development or cyberattacks; Beth Barnes, founder of METR, a nonprofit that evaluates AI models pre-release; and Brandan Foddy of Mercor, which develops AI for job and industry automation. The article, a collaboration with the Transformer Substack newsletter, notes that Denny utilized AI to produce portraits resembling VHS tapes.

Denny's series, titled“Technologists Portraits,” depicts smiling figures against artificial backgrounds, characterized by a distorted, oversaturated palette reminiscent of“vintage” media. This aesthetic starkly contrasts with the considerable influence wielded by these relatively unknown AI experts.“With each major paradigm shift in the past 20 years,” Denny explained,“I have tried to map and unpack some of this community's stories as they narrate our experience of a changing technological world. The distortions of the final compositions are traces of the changes that are coming and the people bringing them about.”

Denny, known for his exploration of art and technology, has also contributed writings on the subject, including pieces on defense tech aesthetics in April and Polymarket in October, both for Artforum. He represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 with his exhibition“Secret Power,” which transformed internet servers into displays for leaked documents and visual content concerning the National Security Agency and the“ Five Eyes” intelligence alliance. More recently, his work Output 0971 (2025) from the“Machine Painting” series was shown in the“Sentient Earth” exhibition at Amant.

Denny expressed his fascination with the narratives surrounding technology creators:“I'm interested in the stories that are woven by the people making the technology that we end up using. It's hard to parse what's mythology and what's truth when we're confronting machine learning; it's really unfamiliar even to those actors who are building it. This is why myth making is so important in the tech space. How does all of this become familiar and normalized?”

We previously reported:

Artist Sarp Kerem Yavuz has challenged Pope Leo XIV's recent statement distinguishing human art from AI-generated work, advocating for AI as a new artistic

Source: ARTnews

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