Simon Denny Portraits New York Magazine's 'New AI Elite' in VHS Style

Berlin-based artist Simon Denny has created AI-generated portraits of 26 AI engineers, founders and thinkers for New York Magazine's latest "Power" issue. The series, titled Technologists Portraits, illustrates the article "So Few People, So Much Influence," a collaboration with Transformer, a Substack newsletter covering the power and politics of AI.

The article profiles figures whose "influence on the AI landscape far outstrips their fame," as the magazine puts it. Among them:

• Logan Graham of Anthropic, whose job includes pushing AI models toward dangerous capabilities such as building a bioweapon or enacting a cyberattack.
• Beth Barnes, founder of METR, a nonprofit that tests AI models before their release.
• Brandan Foddy of Mercor, a company that trains AI models to take over more jobs and industries.

How did Denny make the portraits?

A footnote to the article explains that Denny used AI to generate the images, giving them the look and feel of VHS tapes. Each portrait shows a smiling figure against a fake-seeming backdrop, rendered in the crackly, oversaturated palette associated with vintage media. The dated, distorted style stands in sharp contrast to the power this largely unknown cohort wields — a visual argument in itself.

"With each major paradigm shift in the past 20 years," Denny said, "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."

Who is Simon Denny?

Denny has spent his career exploring the intersection of art and technology, and has recently turned to writing on the subject as well. In April he wrote about the aesthetics of defense tech for Artforum; in October he covered Polymarket for the same publication.

He represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. His exhibition there, "Secret Power," turned internet servers into vitrines displaying leaked documents and visual material about the National Security Agency and the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance linking the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

More recently, his piece Output 0971 (2025), from the "Machine Painting" series, appeared in the group exhibition "Sentient Earth" at Amant in New York.

"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?"

The commission signals a shift: mainstream magazines now turn to contemporary artists — not illustrators — to visualize the AI industry's mostly invisible leadership, and Denny's distorted, machine-made frames are a fitting vehicle for figures the public has never seen.