AI book cover

[Prince of Spires]

In general I have 2 opinion's on AI art. The first is that something needs to be figured out about training material. Courts need to figure out if AI can just grab anything they want to use as training input, similar to someone visiting a museum and being inspired by art on display. Or if it counts as actually using the material in a copyright sence, which would mean that the artists would need to licence their work before it can be used, and that they should get some form of compensation. This is very much up in the air, and there is no consensus about how courts (or lawmakers for that matter) will rule on this.

The other side is that AI art is very much a viable technique. It's a tool that can be used to create images. If I'm honest, most AI covers I've seen are orders of magnitude better than most cheap stockphoto covers. And most readers will not care or see if a cover is AI made or not. They will only consider if they like it. I've created a few facebook ads with AI images, and never once has anyone noted that they thought it was AI made or that they hated it because of that or that it somehow cheapened my brand. I have had people comment that they liked the image. I know, that's anecdotal, but make of that what you will.

As for detecting AI art, we've very recently had an AI book cover win an cover art competition (where using AI was specifically not allowed). Only when the actual, original photoshop files were examined was it proven that it was AI made. Which should prove that AI has very much moved past the point of "it's AI so it sucks."

As with all other technologies, AI is here to stay. It can't be put back into its box anymore and made to disappear. If you're an artist, that's very much the sad truth of it. Will people still value human created art? Of course. Just like we still value Magnus Carlson becoming chess world champion, even though most chess computers could kick his ass. But if you're in the business of creating cheap covers for indie authors, then your competition is AI, whether you like it or not. You will need to either accept lower margins or offer something the AI can't deliver because that's who you're up against.

And I agree with _Michael_ that if you're a small indie author, then AI is a very tempting deal and I can't hold it against you. I can honestly say that my cover artist has earned more on my books that I have, by several orders of magnitude even. Most books don't sell more than a handful of copies. It's then hard to justify $500 or even $100 for a cover, when you'll likely make $10 at most. And as for not aging well, that's not a problem. You can easily replace the cover in one or two years if it's free to create for you using AI. And it's a lot easier to do so than if you have to pay another $100 for a cover that might never make its money back.

 

[Finchbearer]

Okay, while we’re at it just make AI generated novels, you know, since art doesn’t matter anymore! And also seeing as we’re putting so little value into the creation of the books themselves, why bother making the writing have even an ounce of human made touch if the cover doesn’t. If anyone lurks on this website I at least want to make it clear that I think there is immense value in creating something without the use of AI.

There are some things AI can be good for, but not for this.

 

[Finchbearer]

Designers are not up against AI, they’re up against themselves, but a poor imitation of their own work. AI plagiarises because it’s taking all the images humans created - it’s artificial.

 

[Finchbearer]

Your point is ignored as it violates the rules of debate. The argument wasn't about AI generated novels, that's you using false equivalency and a straw man argument as a red herring.

Feel free to send us money to afford human-created works. PM me for my bank routing information. I myself will need at least $12,000.

My point is ignored by you because you’re ignorant.

Feel free to not engage with me anymore, and enjoy trying to make money from your unoriginal AI generated dribble.

 

[Finchbearer]

If you wanted me to block you because you can't hold an adult conversation, all you had to do was ask.

Feel free to send us money to afford human-created works. PM me for my bank routing information. I myself will need at least $12,000.

This is your idea of adult conversation?

 

[pmmg]

I can still see the pic.

I was wrong on this, I cannot see the pic, only the link, if that matters. I missed that you had said, in the first post. -sorry.

Then why are you in an AI book cover thread at all? Not understanding the motiviation, here. The OP was clearly seeking AI generators for his book cover.

Coming in here just to say, "Oh, it's AI. Ew," seems a bit like troll bait to me.

I think you missed the part where my comment was actually quoting another post above it, and was in response to it. But, just as I wont have much respect for writers using AI and calling it their own, I also wont respect much cover artists using AI and calling their own.

In general I have 2 opinion's on AI art. The first is that something needs to be figured out about training material. Courts need to figure out if AI can just grab anything they want to use as training input, similar to someone visiting a museum and being inspired by art on display. Or if it counts as actually using the material in a copyright sence, which would mean that the artists would need to licence their work before it can be used, and that they should get some form of compensation. This is very much up in the air, and there is no consensus about how courts (or lawmakers for that matter) will rule on thi

I don't feel I need to wait for the courts to decide what is the right thing to do. They are not really in that business anyway. Some law will come, and I am sure it will be mostly favorable to the tech companies, and we will just have to adjust. Many things are here to stay, its still a reflection of myself and my character how I choose to use them, or even if I use them at all. It will not be good enough to maintain or restore a reputation I would prefer by saying....everyone else was doing it. AI will not be for me.

Using AI for book covers has some bleed over into what I am doing, but its not really the same. If AI is stealing the work product of others, and creating things that allow people using to believe it is not someone else's work then I will have side on it not okay to use it, its just another way to theft. I guess the question is, what do I owe to other artists? And its not entirely nothing, as we are all in an artistic endeavor, and are all affected by they changes in technology. But...my art is my written work. That is what I am most concerned has my heart and effort in it. The book cover can become part of the whole, as the whole book can represent my vision of its presentation (and since I am Indi, it will). I don't think it would be entirely wrong to use an AI image, but if I am paying someone, I do expect they are not giving me an AI image. I can do that without them. But just as AI is dropping the value from their industry and work product, it is dropping it from mine. We do share that loss together. I will not remain entirely unsympathetic to it. As a human, I share with the rest of humanity our journey, and I want human's to matter. That's going to be my team

I am sure the cost of AI book covers will drive many to abandon many human artists, and that is a pity. I dont think I can help that. I can say...I will bank on the humans as much as I can. I want to see what we can do. And I wish AI to not be my brand. I'm not interested in handing it over to AI.

As artists, we should be passionate about our work and our industry. On a website about becoming better artists, becoming better at putting input into an AI is not the spirit of creativity I wish to foster. I'd rather help people become better artists instead.

 

[BrittleBones]

Since the topic (as every AI-related thing right now tends to do) has turned into 'is AI a piece of crap or not?' I thought I might as well throw in my own two cents.

I use AI here and there. Sometimes I'll toss around text prompts while I'm brainstorming. It generally can't do any work for me but the act of engaging with it can help organize my thoughts. It's also useful for making character concept art. I can toss a bunch of traits into an image generator and see how it looks- whether it fits what I'm going for with my character or not. I can get a feel for that without needing to go through hours of sketching. Useful.

I won't let it generate whole texts for me- and I think a lot of people wouldn't- cause then why would we be writing in the first place? But, AI, like CGI or MS Paint or whatever, is a tool. Some people like a tool. Some people don't. I'm not going to blame anyone for not wanting anything to do with AI art, but there are some people who need it. People who don't have the skills or the ability to do other things, but still want to get their ideas out into the world. It's true that you should be transparent- when something is more AI than my own work I'll let people know so they can make their judgments well-informed.

Polarizing the topic, though, normally doesn't lead anywhere useful. For the people who dislike AI, don't waste your time by being sarcastic, insulting people, and escalating things into an argument. You're just going to make others irritated.

This was sort of a jumble of thoughts that I think maybe doesn't have a cohesive throughline to it, but I'm not going to spend much longer on this so yeah

 

[pmmg]

For the people who dislike AI, don't waste your time by being sarcastic, insulting people, and escalating things into an argument. You're just going to make others irritated.

Or the reverse...right?

 

[Fyri]

*sigh*

To both sides of this debate: please remember we may have newcomers lurking and what we write here reflects the general atmosphere of the forums.

We are all human here and we don't hold the answers to everything (neither does AI, which is not God). I think it is time to leave this thread behind. It is not accomplishing anything and it is starting to host unkind behavior.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Okay, while we’re at it just make AI generated novels, you know, since art doesn’t matter anymore! And also seeing as we’re putting so little value into the creation of the books themselves, why bother making the writing have even an ounce of human made touch if the cover doesn’t. If anyone lurks on this website I at least want to make it clear that I think there is immense value in creating something without the use of AI.

We're pretty much already there. There are novels being written by AI. Nick Stephenson, one of the bigger indie marketing guru's even has a course on how to use AI to write bestsellers in 30 minutes. You can already find them on Amazon (and when publishing on Amazon you have to mention if you used AI to help you write or not). So what I wrote about (cover) art goes just as much for writing novels.

The main difference is that it's easier to train AI to create images. There are many more images than novels out there. And it's easier to say if something's good or bad with images. Which is why the quality for images is higher than for written works. Also, there is a lot more money to be made in image art than in writing novels.

One thing is though that you can't argue both that AI art sucks and that it will eat into the business of artists. It's either one or the other. Either it's so terrible that no one with any money would think of using it. Or it's good enough for most people (or even better).

Do I use AI either for writing or to create my covers? No. I don't. Because I enjoy writing my own stories, and I love the covers my cover artist creates. She really does go beyond what I could do with AI. However, that does not mean I will hold it against someone who makes a different choice. If you can't afford a cover artist, then AI is a valid alternative, which in many cases produces better covers than cheap cover artists do. If you can't write but want to put a story on paper, feel free to use AI.

Like I said, the technology is now there. Trying to stuff it back in the box is like being a horse salesman in the early 1900's complaining about cars. Or a weaver in the 1800's complaining about the rise of factories. Or someone processing payments in the 1980's complaining about the rise of computers. If you want to make a living with it, then you have to accept AI as a reality. And you either have to work with it, or deliver something the AI can't.

 

[Dankolisic]

Since the topic (as every AI-related thing right now tends to do) has turned into 'is AI a piece of crap or not?' I thought I might as well throw in my own two cents.

I use AI here and there. Sometimes I'll toss around text prompts while I'm brainstorming. It generally can't do any work for me but the act of engaging with it can help organize my thoughts. It's also useful for making character concept art. I can toss a bunch of traits into an image generator and see how it looks- whether it fits what I'm going for with my character or not. I can get a feel for that without needing to go through hours of sketching. Useful.

I won't let it generate whole texts for me- and I think a lot of people wouldn't- cause then why would we be writing in the first place? But, AI, like CGI or MS Paint or whatever, is a tool. Some people like a tool. Some people don't. I'm not going to blame anyone for not wanting anything to do with AI art, but there are some people who need it. People who don't have the skills or the ability to do other things, but still want to get their ideas out into the world. It's true that you should be transparent- when something is more AI than my own work I'll let people know so they can make their judgments well-informed.

Polarizing the topic, though, normally doesn't lead anywhere useful. For the people who dislike AI, don't waste your time by being sarcastic, insulting people, and escalating things into an argument. You're just going to make others irritated.

This was sort of a jumble of thoughts that I think maybe doesn't have a cohesive throughline to it, but I'm not going to spend much longer on this so yeah

I did a thing a couple of months ago, went online and found a fantasy ai character where you cam create your character using suggestions, and it was fun when you make a character and then talk to them. But the free ai is not really smart, it cant remember vital argument points and just improvises, but still it was fun pretending to talk to one of my characters.
There was one line where i whispered to myself: " ah, classic Banut"
Banut is a character that is stubborn and rowdy and proud.
But i never use ai to fill in the blanks, sometimes i generate a couple of portraits just to, as you said, organize my thoughts.

 

[Finchbearer]

I’m not here saying that all AI is a piece of s*** and nobody should use it. I find it fascinating, disturbing, and there’s far more AI tech out there than just the types that can make images or prose - I think that AI used in certain applications can be exciting or interesting, or at best actually useful. It’s been over a decade since I went to design school and I bet that it’s a hot topic for discussion, and students are probably writing dissertations about it. They are probably also working with it, collaborating with it and creating some interesting stuff - but that is academia, where you get to ask questions rather than use it as a quick fix for what is essentially a low attention span. Far easier to type in a quick prompt than do any actual work right?

It’s at its most disturbing to me when it’s used for the creation of something creative in it’s entirety such as a novel or a book cover and then used to make money from. As you say anyone can create a novel with chat GPT or any other type of writing AI and get it onto Kindle, which saturates the market making it harder for actual writers to get noticed. And then there is the murky aspect of not knowing what is AI made and what isn’t. It’s being used as make money fast schemes, which is a real shame.

I read an article that magazines are getting an influx of AI written stuff, and they can tell by those stories having similarities, but there’ll be the inevitable one that makes it past the expert eye. One magazine said they are getting around 500 AI submission to around 700 human made ones. That’s alarming.

 

[Finchbearer]

Is AI Art Stealing from Artists?

 

[Prince of Spires]

_Michael_ here I agree with Finchbearer that it's not that clear cut. The problem with AI isn't so much the output as it is the input. It's not clear if that input could have been used the way it has been. And there is very much a difference between what Word does and what DALL-E does. Just to give a counter example, Napster was very much held accountable for what users did on their platform.

Also, while complete plagiarism hasn't happened as such, writers have found specific sentences copies from their work by AI, as well as characters, names and places. And there have been plenty of examples of watermarks actually appearing in AI art creations (though these probably have manually been trained out of the data by now).

Another key difference between Word and AI tools is the actual rights to the images (or words). For Word, Microsoft doesn't get any rights to stuff created with it. Which is (or can be) very different with AI tooling. Just a grab from the terms of service of one AI image generator:

For images made public, Leonardo.Ai and its successors retain worldwide perpetual rights to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, create derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute text prompts and images you input into the services, or any assets produced by the service at your direction. Leonardo.Ai retains the rights to make the assets available to the public, and use them commercially for the purposes of providing, maintaining, promoting, and improving the services.

Additionally, other users also are granted a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to access these publicly available assets through the service and to use those assets (including reproducing, distributing, modifying, displaying, and performing them) only as enabled by a feature of the service.

I very much doubt you'll find similar wording in Word's terms of service (especially since "made public" is the default setting). Microsoft will not have any rights to whatever piece the Washington Post got sued for.

So it's definitely not black and white, but rather different shades of grey. Which is why I mentioned that one of the main things that needs to be resolved is how to treat the stuff going into the system to train it.

 

[Naruzeldamaster]

Personally I would only ever use AI generated art to give myself an 'idea' of what I wanted.
And then go out to commission a more finely defined version of what the AI generated.
Especially for something as important as a book cover.
Unless the gag of the story is that the story itself was written by an AI, (I mean, written by a human but the narrator making the story is an AI) then the joke could go both ways. Otherwise I prolly wouldn't use AI art at all, even paid ones.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Just this week I can across this presentation from a professional cover artist, who adresses AI:

It's an interesting take. And I think his example shows how good the art has become.

Also, keep in mind that if you commission a cover, then unless your cover artist draws the whole thing themselves, there is a very real chance some AI generated image is included in your cover. 2 ways: The first is that your cover artist uses AI directly to create part of you cover. For instance, to create specific characters, which is normally a pricy part of creating a cover. It's quick and gets unique results.

The second way is that many (almost all) cover artists use stock-image websites. Which are just large collections of images about pretty much anything you can come up with. These sites contain an ever increasing number of AI generated images. And they are not always flagged as such. Which means that the cover artist is still sourcing his images in the same way, he's just getting AI images as part of the deal.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Shutterstock has AI built-in now, and so does Photoshop. Unless you specify no AI and they're honest about it, yeah.

I've pretty much come down on the side of AI art is pretty much like stock art. And like the guy int he video, for marketing and other stuff? It's too handy to overlook.

Just this week I can across this presentation from a professional cover artist, who adresses AI:

It's an interesting take. And I think his example shows how good the art has become.

Also, keep in mind that if you commission a cover, then unless your cover artist draws the whole thing themselves, there is a very real chance some AI generated image is included in your cover. 2 ways: The first is that your cover artist uses AI directly to create part of you cover. For instance, to create specific characters, which is normally a pricy part of creating a cover. It's quick and gets unique results.

The second way is that many (almost all) cover artists use stock-image websites. Which are just large collections of images about pretty much anything you can come up with. These sites contain an ever increasing number of AI generated images. And they are not always flagged as such. Which means that the cover artist is still sourcing his images in the same way, he's just getting AI images as part of the deal.

 

[Graybles]

Plus…all I will go back to all AI has a sort of wonky off-kilter look to it that will not age well. You don’t want your book cover to look like the era it was made in in years to come. Every single self published AI fantasy book cover looks like this:

And

This depends on the resources and skill of the AI user more than anything else. Stable Diffusion has come a long way from what it was in the beginning. A good Checkpoint Blend, some LoRA's, Embeddings and a nice ESRGAN upscale later and you can create stuff that look way better than these covers though...

I use SD with Automatic 1111 (for 1.5) and ComfyUI (for SDXL) to generate concept art for my stories as visualizing stuff does help a lot sometimes. But I admit that the ones shown here are bland.

 

[SandyC]

Let me give you some good ones.

catbird.ai is free with registration
perchance is free totally (up to 12 images at a crack!)
junia.ai is okay (you get a small number per month)
MS Bing image creator is free (use your microsoft account to sign in, 15 prompts a day, in sets of four images)

Hope those help to get you started.

Thanks for sharing. I will take a look at it too. Have always trouble with covers.

 

[SandyC]

Okay, after being on Nightcafe for a month or so, I've gotta say, Nightcafe blows Perchance out of the water. I love using the prompt, "Dungeons and Dragons style" because it gives you that pulpy matte painting look with a lot of detail. This, for instance, is Vangälis, the legendary Citadel of Stone built by the mad dwarf-king, Magram Mithrandus.

This is the kind of art that I could spend hours looking at.

Same for me. Just to dive into a daydream of walking around, looking up, and sneaking inside to find out how it feels and sounds