Impressions of the Times: an AI Paints the news
An AI-generated image of a the New York Times headline “Putin Seems to Sideline Advisers on Ukraine, Taking a Political Risk.”
An image based on the headline “Bombing of Civilian Targets Intensifies” during the Russia-Ukraine war. The AI visually abstracts the story in a way similar to how we read the news. We can imagine the event, but ultimately we consume it passively as if it’s entertainment.
Abstract paintings of news stories. No human required.
Twice a day, an AI creates abstract art based on the lead story from the New York Times and posts it to Twitter. The AI presents news images not as photographs, but as modernist paintings, a medium associated with highbrow entertainment in museums and galleries, not with reporting.
The paintings aim to abstract away the realism of the news in the same way that stories of far-off wars and famines appear as theoretical events that draw our passing interest. The paintings emphasize the frequent disconnect between real news events and our daily lives. Like art, news is often treated as something to look at, something to catch our interest, and perhaps something to discuss over dinner.
The abstract paintings ask us to interrogate the role of journalism in our lives. Do we consume news only for information or also for its ability to entertain and distract us?
Note: This project ran from March to July 2022. The Twitter feed is no longer updated, but the archived images are still visible there.
This project uses a Python-based GAN implementation originally written by Katherine Crowson. My implementation can be found here.