About the Cover & Feature Artwork

To create this issue’s cover, graphic designer and art director Mark Bennett worked with an unusual collaborator — an artificial intelligence visualization tool called Midjourney. 

“We wanted the cover image to be an abstract representation of the creative processes involved in science and medicine,” says Bennett, who drew his inspiration from a discussion with a medical scientist about the parallels between scientific research and creativity in the arts. 

“I saw similarities between the creative processes that take place in art, design and music, and those that take place in the context of scientific research.” 

With this in mind, Bennett began to experiment with the machine-generated visuals. He entered keywords and phrases into Midjourney’s command field to instruct the program to select from a database of 250,000-plus images stored on a Discord server. The AI platform then retrieved and remixed the reference images, creating an original new visual each time Bennett tweaked the instructions. 

“There was a lot of back and forth to adjust the keywords to create the images we wanted,” says Bennett, who reviewed each iteration — rejecting many — until the cover was just right. 

“There is a balance between letting the program create freely and maintaining human oversight and control of the final result,” he says. 

Do we think AI will replace illustrators? No. If anything, the collaborative cover highlights the importance of the human touch in the creative process. 

“Making images and my perception of the scientific research process are closely related,” concludes Bennett. “Creativity and concept are the foundation, while artificial intelligence provides the tools.” 

You will see more collaborative illustrations in the opening story, which explores the links between art and science and creativity. For each illustration, the keywords used to generate the image are in the caption.