What is the face of the man behind the apple? For almost 60 years, the figure wearing a sombre suit and bowler hat in René Magritte’s painting “The Son of Man” has been obscured by a polished green apple. His facial features were intended to remain a mystery, the fruit an artistic provocation. Today, using new technology, 23-year-old digital artist Josephine Miller can roll the apple away.
Miller tilts her laptop towards me in the hushed café of the British Library in London to show how she used Dall-E 2, software that generates images using artificial intelligence (AI), to remove the fruit. Behind it is a man who looks startled to be suddenly revealed, eyebrows raised and piercing blue eyes staring out over an expertly waxed moustache. The face is painted in Magritte’s somewhat flat style and signature palette, as if the two images were painted by the same hand, side by side.
It’s a neat trick. Then Miller shows me she has generated not one but 200 possible faces. Magritte, a trickster at heart, probably would have approved. The technology, which can create near-infinite artistic combinations in response to a few words or images, has enabled Miller to do work that would have either taken months with previous tools or might not have been possible at all. It is dizzying in both its capabilities and its ethical implications. I ask if she finds it overwhelming. “No,” she says immediately. “Well, maybe it is for some people, but I’m just excited.”