In June 2022, Cosmopolitan published a print cover whose central image was generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 for a special report on artificial intelligence. The magazine billed it, in its own words, as “The World’s Smartest Artificial Intelligence Just Made Its First Magazine Cover,” and described the work as the first attempt “to go the whole nine yards” with an AI-generated cover, while noting The Economist had used an AI image the prior week.
The cover shows a female astronaut striding across Mars. According to Cosmopolitan’s account, the final image came from the prompt “wide-angle shot from below of a female astronaut with an athletic feminine body walking with swagger toward camera on Mars in an infinite universe, synthwave digital art.” The magazine collaborated with OpenAI and digital artist Karen X. Cheng, who emphasized that while “the AI thinks for 20 seconds” to produce six candidate images, getting a usable cover took many attempts and hours of prompt refinement, plus human layout work for the text and proportions.
The astronaut choice was deliberate, meant to encourage the magazine’s young female readers toward science and space careers.
Why business readers should care: a mainstream consumer brand putting generative AI on its cover, only weeks after DALL-E 2 became available, signaled how fast image generation jumped from research demo to commercial creative tool - and how quickly the “first AI cover” marketing race began.