Classic WIRED Covers—Regenerated by AI

Jessica Pettway, Photographer
“The visual archive DALL-E is pulling from feels like one of the worst archives I’ve ever seen in terms of diversity in visual language and culture. When trying to make my piece, certain words and phrases weren’t returning logical results. For example, when searching ‘woman wearing box braids,’ the first results were white women in loose braids. When trying to explore the concept of digital blackface, it wasn’t necessary to add ‘caucasian’ or ‘white’ to the search phrases because that was already the assumed default, even when searching items and themes specific to Black culture.”

Prompt Example: “hoop earring,” “mouth smiling wearing grills,” “white hand with super long nails pointing”

Sam Cannon, Photographer
“DALL-E has an impressive dataset to pull from, but I did find some pleasure in the fact that, despite the 650 million image/caption pairs it uses to generate images, it wasn’t able to render out a close replica of my cover. While it had no problem creating images with similar elements (needles, hands, pills) and mimicking the overall style (dark environment, harsh light from above), the abstract idea of a hand pushing through a pin screen was outside of its capabilities … for now.”

Prompt Example: “A 3D rendering of a figure with its head in its hands being pierced with thousands of needles, octane, harsh light”

Patrick Savile, Designer and Illustrator
“It was kind of hard to get what I originally wanted, so I was shifting the concept around a bit until I could get an image as close to the idea in my head, which turned out to be egg-based.” 

Prompt Example: “High detail airbrush painting of an egg cracking open containing clouds, storm clouds in the background, shimmering psychedelic colours, high contrast, masao saito, Michael whelan, hajime sorayama, high resolution”