work in progress

This Week’s Art School Topic: AI Editorial Illustrations

Can AI be your therapist, your mom, or your only friend? This week I’m sketching out some thoughts on tech, trust, and talking to bots.

Charlie Yellow

• 1 min read
This Week’s Art School Topic: AI Editorial Illustrations
Since this topic feels personal, I had tons of ideas—but it was tricky to find a direction that could actually turn into the kind of smart illustration you'd see in the NYT!

This week’s My Imaginary Art School theme is… Artificial Intelligence!
It’s everywhere lately, and I talk about it all the time too—it’s useful, sure, but there are so many layers and mixed feelings that come with it. That complexity makes it a perfect topic for this week’s assignment.

Also, I’ve always dreamed of having one of my illustrations published in a major paper like The New York Times someday, so I decided to treat this assignment like practice for an editorial illustration on AI. Shoot for the stars, right?

On Monday and Tuesday, I gathered ideas and references by searching Pinterest, doing image searches, and even looking through actual New York Times articles about AI. The styles varied from abstract illustrations to literal photography, which helped me brainstorm different directions. I also dumped all my thoughts and feelings about AI onto paper to see what themes popped out.

Tomorrow’s secret mission: figure out how I want to draw AI.

Today, I sketched out a few tiny thumbnails based on the ideas that stood out. Then I chose three of them to develop into mini concept roughs—one per page:

  1. A person talking nonstop to AI and feeling satisfied, but slowly losing touch with actual human interaction.
  2. A slightly silly take on how AI is like a mom or teacher, constantly giving feedback on everything we say and do—helpful, but also a little absurd.
  3. A more emotional one about how more and more people are sharing their deepest worries with AI and treating it as a source of comfort and advice.

Tomorrow, I’ll pick one of these ideas and explore it further with different composition and sketch options. Stay tuned!