JooHee Yoon's "Drawing Hands with A.I. (After M. C. Escher)"

Chatbots and image generators, newly on the rise, have sparked our imaginations--and our fears. As artificial-intelligence machines sharpen their ability to translate written prompts into images that accurately capture both style and substance, some visual artists worry that their specialized skills might be rendered irrelevant. Even so, the new technologies at our disposal broaden our understanding of the relationship between artist and work. In her cover for the April 24 & May 1, 2023, Innovation & Tech Issue, her first for the magazine, JooHee Yoon addresses the topic in a clever image that illustrates the reciprocity and the tension that can exist between artists and these high-tech tools (is the robot hand drawing the real hand, or vice versa?). Yoon's cover also demonstrates what makes artists unique: their ideas and their point of view. M. C. Escher (1898-1972), a Dutch graphic artist whose approach was an inspiration for Yoon, is a case in point.