Visual arts

Expanding SZA’s SOS album cover cheapens the theme of the album, as AI placing people in the water undermines the artist’s attempt at capturing her own loneliness.Image: DALL-EThe beauty of a good album cover is that it can perfectly encapsulate the mood of a dozen or so songs in a single image or illustration—and that’s a difficult feat when you only have a square-sized canvas to work with. In order to depict the world that an album takes place in, musicians and their designated team of photographers, stylists, and/or…

In March, a group of mathematicians identified a thirteen-sided shape called “the hat” that can tile a surface without any patterns repeating. Now the researchers are updating the shape to maintain its quirky tiling properties while addressing an important caveat.Getty Images Wants AI to Stop Copying ThemThe new type of shape is called a “spectre” and it’s what’s known as an aperiodic monotile, which means that a single shape can tile a surface without any translational symmetry, or without its pattern ever repeating.…

The Supreme Court ruled that Campbell’s soup can painter Andy Warhol violated a photographer’s copyright when he borrowed from her 1981 portrait of Prince. It’s a case that will have sweeping implications for intellectual property law in the US.Getty Images Wants AI to Stop Copying ThemPhotographer Lynn Goldsmith sued the Warhol Foundation, arguing that the pop artist infringed on her copyright when he made a silkscreen print using one of her photographs. You don’t have to pay the original artist if it’s fair use, which…

Clementine, by Tillie WaldenImage: Image Comics | Tillie WaldenThe Eisner Awards, one of the most prestigious comic awards currently awarded in the United States, has announced its 2023 nominees. Much like last year, Image and DC publishing once again netted the most nominations, but this year Image has more nods: 20 (plus six shared) and DC with 11 (plus five shared). While the award is given out at San Diego Comic-Con, people and art from across the world are represented.Getty Images Wants AI to Stop Copying ThemImage…

The room containing the dolia was surrounded by viewing areas.Illustration: D. BoomsArchaeologists have discovered the remains of an1,800-year-old winery at the Villa of the Quintilii outside of Rome. By the team’s measure, the winery was designed as much for the spectacle of wine-making as the practice itself.Decorated rooms around the winery appear to have hosted guests who would observe the wine-making process, the researchers found, and the finishes (including marble floors) seem installed for appearances over…

Melissa Barrera at the world premiere of Scream VI at AMC Lincoln Square Theater on in New York City.Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris (Getty Images)Radio Silence—directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and producer Chad Villella—successfully rebooted one of horror’s biggest franchises with Scream and Scream VI. Now they’ve tapped the star of those films, Melissa Barrera, to join another movie reviving a beloved property from horror’s past, in the form of a mysterious Universal Monster project.Spoilers of the Week:…

Photography originally established itself without color, but with the arrival of colors in the 1890s, monochrome pictures slowly disappeared. It is still practiced today but is only popular among a niche set of photographers. As a non-photographer myself, I use smartphones to capture photos, so the art of monochrome photography was unknown to me. That is until I used the Xiaomi 13 Pro and its Leica-powered cameras, which not only introduced me to the style but made me a better photographer overall. The many…

Sony just announced its latest Spatial Reality Display, the ELF-SR2, which displays a stereoscopic image you can see without needing special glasses. Sony’s new generation of 4K-resolution spatial displays is bigger and better than ever. Face-tracking, 3D display technology isn’t new, but the display size makes this latest offering notable. Sony The ELF-SR2’s 27-inch display eclipses the previous generation’s 15.6-inch screen, a much more appealing size for the professional creators Sony is targeting. The…

Photo: J. David Ake (AP)Getty Images Wants AI to Stop Copying ThemShortly after rumors leaked of former President Donald Trump’s impending indictment, images purporting to show his arrest appeared online. These images looked like news photos, but they were fake. They were created by a generative artificial intelligence system.Generative AI, in the form of image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, and text generators like Bard, ChatGPT, Chinchilla and LLaMA, has exploded in the public sphere. By…

Days after several core members behind the success of Mondo were fired by Funko, Funko’s CEO released a statement explaining what comes next. And it’s not great.Getty Images Wants AI to Stop Copying Them“The Mondo posters business will continue, period,” CEO Brian Mariotti said in a statement released via social media. “We feel that making extremely limited runs of posters, most of which are 150 pieces or under, limits access to fans unfairly. Many of these posters are bought with the sole purpose of flipping them at a…