Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.

August 31, 2024

Illustration by Jackie Carlise

You’ve read your last free article. Subscribe now to keep reading.. If you're already a subscriber, sign in.

New Yorker Favorites

A man was murdered in cold blood and you’re laughing?
The best albums of 2024.
Little treats galore: a holiday gift guide.
How Maria Callas lost her voice.
An objectively objectionable grammatical pet peeve.
What happened when the Hallmark Channel “leaned into Christmas.”

Ted Chiang is the author of two collections of science-fiction short stories, “Stories of Your Life and Others,” and “Exhalation.”

More:Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)Art, Artists Automation Creativity

Magazine

A Revolution in How Robots Learn

A future generation of robots will not be programmed to complete specific tasks. Instead, they will use A.I. to teach themselves.

By James Somers

Culture

Frank Auerbach’s Raw Truths

“I find it all very difficult,” the late German-born British artist said, and few painters have done as much to show the struggle of creative endeavor.

By Anthony Lane

Culture

Why Do We Talk This Way?

Technology is dramatically changing political speech, rewarding quantity and variety over the neat messages of the past.

By Joshua Rothman

Magazine

The Confident Anxiety of Rashid Johnson

Rashid Johnson, who is preparing for a major mid-career show at the Guggenheim, explores depths of masculine vulnerability that few of his contemporaries have touched.

By Calvin Tomkins

A Critic at Large

The Hidden Story of J. P. Morgan’s Librarian

Belle da Costa Greene, a brilliant archivist, buried her own history.

By Hilton Als

Magazine

The Art Dealer Who Wanted to Be Art

Asher Wertheimer was a Jewish tycoon who asked John Singer Sargent to paint him. The results are strange, slippery—and some of the artist’s best work.

By Jackson Arn

Magazine

The Philosopher L. A. Paul Wants Us to Think About Our Selves

To whom should we have allegiance—the version of ourself making choices, or the version of ourself who will be affected by them?

By Alice Gregory

Magazine

The Deep Elation of Working with Wood

In “Ingrained,” Callum Robinson honors not just the art of carpentry but the passion of labor itself.

By Casey Cep

Culture

What Does a Translator Do?

Damion Searls, who has translated a Nobel laureate, believes his craft isn’t about transforming or reflecting a text. It’s about conjuring one’s experience of it.

By Max Norman

Books

What Professional Organizers Know About Our Lives

Overwhelmed by too much stuff, we hire experts to help us sort things out. But what’s really behind all the clutter?

By Jennifer Wilson

Books

A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer

Between 2003 and 2019, Kevin Killian published almost twenty-four hundred reviews on the site. Can they be considered literature?

By Oscar Schwartz

Magazine

Should a Country Speak a Single Language?

In India, one of the world’s most polyglot countries, the government wants more than a billion people to embrace Hindi. One scholar thinks that would be a loss.

By Samanth Subramanian

Daily

New Yorker Favorites

The New Yorker’s newsletter

Get unlimited access.