Christoph Niemann’s “Create Your Own Cover with Till-E”

In a sequence drawn by Christoph Niemann for the cover of the November 20, 2023, A.I. Issue, an artist encountering a creative block is rescued by Till-E, a bot who eagerly takes over the job. Niemann, with his characteristic biting humor, imagines the unintended consequences of turning to artificial intelligence to solve problems of the artistic imagination. The cover’s strap, a graphic element that has occupied the left of every New Yorker cover since 1925, guides the reader to an interactive area of our Web site where anyone can partner with the industrious little bot to create their own cover. I talked to Niemann about his cheeky take on artificial intelligence and why he doesn’t seem overly concerned that robots will bring about the end of life as we know it.

What do you think of concerns that A.I. threatens to replace creators?

I haven’t seen anything that would come close to that yet—so far, it’s pretty superficial bling. I’m sure that A.I.-generated art will become better and better, and eventually might even create intriguing conceptual work. The deciding question will be: Do we care whether the art is made by a human being?

Let’s say you have six-year-old twins. They both write you a birthday card. One uses A.I., the other one doesn’t. The A.I. art will be “better.” It won’t have typos, it will display great calligraphy and a perfect drawing. And still, I would throw it straight into the garbage and keep the human-made one. For me, art is about human intent. If a larger audience agrees, creators will be fine; otherwise, we’re doomed.

Your interactive feature includes many iconic symbols and some well-known memes. Has the proliferation of images on the Internet helped develop a new visual language?

Of course! For all the downsides of social media, one of the most thrilling aspects is that it has shown people to be much more visually literate than was generally assumed.

A.I. image generators pull from a variety of well-known artists’ styles. Are there any mitigating steps you would like to see to protect the rights of artists?

I have so many images on the Web—there is no way to tag them. And, even if I tried, I would only find the ones that are connected with my name. A much more promising approach is to use a wonderful new tool that lets you “poison” your art. It’s called Nightshade. Essentially, it works like this: you create an image of a cat, but the file contains hidden pixels, so the algorithm will think it’s, for example, a tree. If enough people generate images like that, the A.I. engines will spit out more and more nonsense. These artificial-intelligence agents have been trained on our creations, but software like this might give artists the power to protect their work and sow some chaos.

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