For its latest “Power” issue, New York Magazine commissioned Berlin-based artist Simon Denny to illustrate the article “So Few People, So Much Influence,” about 26 AI engineers, founders, and thinkers whose “influence on the AI landscape far outstrips their fame.”
These include people like Logan Graham of Anthropic, whose job is to try and push AI models to do terrifying things like build a bioweapon or enact a cyberattack; Beth Barnes, the founder of METR, a nonprofit that tests AI models before they are released; and Brandan Foddy of Mercor, which trains AI models to take over more jobs and industries.
The article, a collaboration with Transformer, a Substack newsletter about the power and politics of AI, includes a footnote explaining that Denny used AI to generate portraits that had the look and feel of VHS tapes. Indeed, each of Denny’s Technologists Portraits, as the series is called, shows a smiling figure with a fake-seeming backdrop depicted in the kind of crackly, oversaturated palette associated with “vintage” media like VHS. The dated, distorted style of the portraits is a powerful contrast to the the power and influence held by this cohort of virtually 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 has long explored the intersection between art and technology, and has lately been writing about the topic as well. (In April, he wrote about the aesthetics of defense tech and in October about Polymarket, both for Artforum.) He represented New Zealand in the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, where his show, “Secret Power,” turned internet servers into vitrines to display leaked documents and visual content about the National Security Agency and an intelligence alliance between the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand known as “Five Eyes.”
More recently, Denny’s piece Output 0971 (2025), from his “Machine Painting” series, was included in the exhibition “Sentient Earth” at Amant. “I’m interested in the stories that are woven by the people making the technology that we end up using,” Denny told ARTnews. “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?”
