As you read this post, a debate is raging on author Twitter about A.I.-generated book covers.
Some are hailing these art algorithms as the best publishing innovation since Gutenberg.
Others are … denouncing A.I. as demonic? Or something.
To be honest, I can’t get a read on the most emphatic anti-A.I. art positions. It looks like they just have visceral, emotional aversions to the concept.
The most coherent argument I can find is that images generated by algorithm aren’t real art.
OK.
Maybe that’s true.
Art is work performed to a standard.
So if you just plugged some keywords into Midjourney and let it fly with no oversight, yeah. I could see that not being art.
Conflating someone doing that and slapping it on a book cover with what industry pros are doing – and have been secretly doing for years – is an equivocation.
But just the thought of an author using a refined A.I.-generated cover may offend some folks’ aesthetic sensibilities. I get where they’re coming from. That’s cool.
Here’s the part where most A.I. art enthusiasts will say, “If you don’t like it, don’t use it.”
But I’m not gonna hand you that platitude.
What I will say is that of course authors are free to decide what kind of art goes on their books.
Total creative control over every aspect of publishing has always been the animating spirit of newpub.
What some appear to have forgotten is that the main reason newpub exists is that oldpub outfits were playing gatekeeper, smothering nascent careers, and all around making it harder to earn a living as a writer.
Most newpub authors turned to Amazon because it offered a viable way to make an end run around the gatekeepers.
And it’s a good reference point, since Amazon uses search and marketing algorithms that helped new authors reach readers.
At first.
Now Amazon’s algos make it impossible for anyone to find anything, so newpub authors are moving on.
And that’s the beauty of newpub. We’re not wedded to any market, tool, or method.
When a new one comes along that can help realize an author’s vision, improve his productivity, or bolster his margins, we take advantage of it until it no longer serves authors.
That’s where a majority of newpub authors I’ve seen throwing their hats into the great A.I. debate are coming from.
They’re not fanatical about A.I. art, but they recognize its potential to aid their business. So they’re open to using it.
And that majority attitude relates to “Don’t like it? Don’t use it.”
Because most authors are going to use it.
And it will give them a definite market advantage.
Let’s try a thought experiment.
Author 1 hires artists to design his covers. He spends $500-$1500 per cover and spends 3-6 weeks giving input to the author, approving pencils, and suggesting changes to draft images. Every time he publishes a book.
Author 2 spends $0 and four hours on a Saturday afternoon generating the exact cover he wants every time he publishes a book.
That’s not a dig at anyone. That’s economic reality.
Which makes it more vital than ever for authors to understand why they want to write and publish books.
If you have an awesome story idea clamoring to get out of your brain and onto the page so you can express yourself, that’s great. Use whatever cover art you want. Go ahead and user finger paint if it genuinely expresses your vision for the book.
Just don’t expect to make any money from it.
If, on the other hand, you’re a working author who wants to earn a living by self-publishing, understand that refusing to use A.I. altogether is a business decision with implications analogous to refusing to publish on KDP.
You can do it. There are authors out there who refused to do business with Amazon and succeeded.
But the overwhelming majority who did succeed used the new tool that gave them a competitive advantage.
My intention here is to help authors understand the choices that forces beyond our control have set before us.
You need to figure out if you want to be an amateur who writes mainly for self-expression or a professional who pays the bills with his craft.
And you need to pick one. Before you start writing the book.
To be frank, I’m suspicious of any meme that tries to convince authors to disadvantage themselves.
A lot of the anti-A.I. art talking points have the ring of anti-SP, anti-GG, and anti-Trump rhetoric from back in the day.
It doesn’t help that oldpub stands to benefit most from newpub authors swearing off A.I. art.
Cui bono?
From what I’ve seen, a lot of accounts like these:
Anti-A.I. art sentiment has come to a head in the past few days. And attempts to backtrace it keep turning up oldpub witches.
This new round of yelling at clouds doesn’t feel organic. In fact, it smells like freshly mowed astrotruf.
Maybe I’m wrong. But I’ve been covering industry movements like this for a decade now. And my track record’s pretty good.
Guess we’ll see.
It’s no skin off my back either way.
I’ve always hired artists to design my covers or designed my own.
My interest here is the same as always: Reaching up for the next rung of the ladder while reaching one hand down to help the next guy up.
One thing we can all agree on is that newpub authors should support each other and deny support to people who hate us.
My best selling book yet, whose cover I made myself, shows you how.
what you perceive as “ai” are just demons infesting computers. your line of “reasoning” to attack the messenger falls right into the intended trap laid out for you.
freemasons believe that you give “consent” to every evil by doing nothing when they surreptitiously warn you what they are planning to do. there is also no such thing as an evil that doesn’t harm other evils, and so when those dolls are panicking you should listen (like when birds fly in the forest or deer get spooked though you can hear nothing).
As I have said many times:
“ the devil operates by reactions. the devil cannot make direct orders, as no one would listen, and has no power to compel or do anything; therefore the devil makes groups insufferable by corrupting their weakness so that a “reactionary group” comes to destroy the former. the reactionary group is the devil’s goal (if a corpse can have a goal, that is).
ex. feminism. the devil HATES women, more than you could imagine. therefore in an attempt to wipe out women once and for all, the devil made weak women stupid, demonic, and insufferable. the goal being that frustrated men would “react” by giving the feminists all their worst fears in revenge; which is what the devil wanted all along.”
https://nigelteapot.wordpress.com/2021/11/14/on-meekness-nominalism-action-movies-effeminacy-and-how-the-worst-problem-in-the-world-is-actually-toxic-masculinity-after-all/
the “dialectic” is the intended weapon, just being the “anti” something is exactly what the devil wanted you to do.
What evidence do you have that demons are infesting computers and creating these images? If they were consistently churning out blasphemous or profane images, then I would consider that evidence, but I don’t see any such. Being too eager to jump to the conclusion of demonic activity is rash, and risks making the Faith look ridiculous to those outside.
The Faith IS ridiculous to those outside, God makes the “wisdom” of unworthy men into their foolishness. demons then feed off of it, knowing they can control you with a single laugh from one of their dolls (old word for possessed) if you’re one of them.
demons have no barriers to possessing non-Humans; the official term for this is “infestation.” demons have been on the internet since the start, unless you don’t think all of the Exorcists warning about specific games and the internet is just silliness.
Here’s a question: why wouldn’t they and what’s stopping them?
Also: How do you explain all the evils of the world increasing to untold degrees since tech became a requirement?
the devil’s century starting in 1917 and mass tech becoming common that same time period is not accidental.
First, the obvious: creative AI software is here to stay. It doesn’t matter if any of us think it’s “dishonorable”; the lessons of history are clear regarding new technologies, and as a student of history, I must listen.
The issue I find with this whole debate is the loss of control over the output. All of the “it’s not REAL art/music/etc.” rhetoric can be boiled down to people surrendering control to the machine instead of making art that is their own expression. It’s one thing to compose the image yourself, then use AI to enhance things like lighting or color. It’s another thing to have it generate the image for you, then you take what it gives you and you only make trivial alterations.
After talking to lots of people on the other side of the issue, I’ve concluded that AI is best when you control the output. It doesn’t matter if the initial iteration was from an AI if you shape and alter that iteration to make it say what you want.
Part of the issue is that there already is zero control of output in OldPub, who are the people complaining loudest about this. You can only publish one type of story in a narrow range of boxes, you will get a cover sourced from cheap photo stock sites, you won’t be properly edited (except for problematic content), and you won’t be promoted at all. That people in these arenas are now screaming about “humanity” being removed from their industry is peak clown world insanity. What is the functional difference of them using free AI instead of paying a small fee for some intern to spend 10 minutes slapping some fonts together in Photoshop? There is no functional difference in the end. The complaining is incoherent.
We have far more advantages than they do, and far more options as well. As much as the debate has been very fruitful on both sides, hopefully we all remember that we aren’t the ones putting out mechanized product that exists only for a quick buck. OldPub is dead regardless of what they do next.
The points you mention are red flags that much of the recent backlash is manufactured. I’ve been conversing with someone deep into the A.I. art scene. It seems there’s been a recent rash of funny business on popular art boards – the same “burning down your own house to spite the outsiders” we saw during SP. The perpetrators are usual suspects of the type showcased in the screen grabs above. And it looks like their DA slacktivism spilled onto Twitter via fellow cultists in oldpub.
The moral: You can’t fully escape being conditioned. So make sure you know who’s doing the conditioning.
I’ve been conversing with someone deep into the A.I. art scene. It seems there’s been a recent rash of funny business on popular art boards – the same “burning down your own house to spite the outsiders” we saw during SP. The perpetrators are usual suspects of the type showcased in the screen grabs above. And it looks like their DA slacktivism spilled onto Twitter via fellow cultists in oldpub.
This may be so, but at least it let me think more deeply about this tech and how it can be used. That’s why I came to the conclusions I now have above — I thought about it over time.
The cold, hard reality is that it’s here to stay, so it’s adapt or die.
Glad you’re thinking about it objectively. That’s being professional.
Something else my contact said bolsters your point. In his experience, most artists are excited about art algorithms. Why? The potential to boost their output and break into markets they couldn’t before.
Example: Pencilers no longer having to rely on inkers or colorists.
In the context of book publishing, you are correct about all those things. I was speaking more broadly.
Regardless, the tools are here to stay, and all of us, whether or now we’re artists, have to deal with it.
ai will only ever hurt small time artists and a trophy creative output.
disney is not sweating, they only benefit. You might not know this but disney has replaced most of their art and animation teams with ai processes for over a decade. Really only observers and senior guys left, all the intern work is outsourced to ai.
THAT is why almost all corporate art looks the same: it’s already ai generated and had been for over 10 years.
Something else my contact said bolsters your point. In his experience, most artists are excited about art algorithms. Why? The potential to boost their output and break into markets they couldn’t before.
Example: Pencilers no longer having to rely on inkers or colorists.
Hits upon something I’ve always said — those with art skills benefit most from art AI, because it can do the filling in and detailing work for them, and the artist can smooth out any errors.
But what I’m most excited about is ChatGPT. It not only lets you brainstorm, it’s like Photoshop for prose.
“it’s like Photoshop for prose”
In what way?
You can write a passage, then ask it to pretty up the verbiage with more sensory detail. Or you can have it reword your passage in a different style.
I feel like AI Art is going to have an effect on Artists akin to what other forms of Automation/Industrialization had on their respective industries (like Wonder Bread and Bakeries, or Fast Food’s impact on Restaurants). It’s going to light a fire under people’s butts, and some folks won’t be able to quit their Day Job, but I think it’s going to inspire a lot of folks to- as the Gamers say- Git Gud.
And those that do will be all the better for it.
The real controversy is that now, there’s one less revenue stream for moderately talented people with unemployable personalities. Art is (was?) one of the last redoubts for personality disorder types with a bad work ethic and no real world skills or training. For them, AI image generation is nothing less than an existential threat.
Something that those types of artists will not mention is how much of their income comes from people who don’t really care about their art. I’m primarily thinking of weirdos who are obsessed with an OC and perverts. Each is looking for something very specific but does not care about the artistic quality, as long it’s not complete crap and all their boxes are ticked. A lot of mediocre artists with bad personalities and little self respect exploited this audience for commission money. But their commissioners never had any respect for the artist to begin with, so of course they would turn to AI art that could do the same things but more quickly and cheaply.
Yeah… most employers and patrons are willing to put up with a coarse personality if the person has an otherwise solid work ethic and produces good stuff, but if all they have is moderately good work? They don’t have a chance at being able to quit their Day Job.
To paraphrase Neil Gaiman (I know, I know, but blind squirrels etc.), the three dispositions employers in creative fields care about are quality, punctuality, and agreeability. Making a career of it requires having two.
In other words, people will hire you if:
>You’re good and produce on time, eve if you’re a bit of a dick.
>You work on jazz time, but you’re skilled and amiable.
>You’re mediocre but keep your deadlines and are a joy to work with.
I’m just going to rehash point you already made. Back during the algorithm craze, people were saying the best way to make money on amazon was to release a book monthly for a year. Now let’s use your high bar example of $1500, so if you did 12 books, that’s $18,000. I’ve said on this blog before, you have to spend money to make money, and I stand by that, but I can absolutely see the draw. Especially with all the intentionally bad or plain covers tradpub is pushing out, and you can make a better one with AI. Screwy hands, dead eyes, and all, an emulated Frazetta is going to look better than a cover with a stock image crown with some filters thrown on it.
Quickly touching some of your other points: If you have played a remastered or remade AAA game, you have supported a company that uses AI art.
You sit down and just start prompting, the image you get is going to look pretty bad, and I think most people will give up on that barrier of entry. The really good ones are the product of tons of generations, people practicing prompts, and lots, and lots of inpainting. Not to mention any photoshopping of the final product. And I’m not even going to get into the people who do textual inversions, hypernetworks, and train their own dreambooth models. Right now, at this stage of the game, it is a skill that requires a human.
As for the demon thing: Tolkien tested phonographs for demons by recording himself reciting the Lord’s Prayer in gothic. Much like voice recording that lead to everything from choir records, to smut, I just think AI is a tool, and any good or ill it produces will be on the person that uses it.
As long as the artists own intentions are preserved, AI is legitimate. Spinning up an image from a prompt will never give you what you envision, even over several iterations; you have to do a lot of work to get the image you want, and that will require art skills.
Count me as one of those who listened to Cole & Anspach’s paywalled podcast and thought they’d found the Holy Grail. I tried following their lead but came up 1 short of their minimum necessary books per year. That led me 20 Books to 50K, where word on the street was they’d finally cracked the code. And the formula turned out to be what you described: Spend $4K/month launching each book to gross $2K in sales, then make it up in volume.
Much of that was Amazon ad spend. That told me Amazon had gone pay-to-play, so I let it fall by the wayside as my main revenue source. Haven’t looked back since.
Experiences like that have taught me not to panic over the A.I. art stuff. When market conditions throw up obstacles, pros find a way around them.
If the choice is between giving money to a Silicon Valley start-up and giving more money to a human being who supports you – for, having noodled about since this discussion began, it is quite clear that quality AI art is something you pay for – then it’s clear which one is a more moral decision. The comparable soullessness of corporate mainstream media is a red herring. The point of the superversive movement is not to imitate that.
(I also agree with that ultimate fuddy-duddy of the faith, John Senior, that the trouble with a phonograph recording of a choir is that it supplants actual choirs.)
“Now Amazon’s algos make it impossible for anyone to find anything, so newpub authors are moving on.”
To where, though? As someone who’s trying to get started with indie publishing (and is not interested in crowdfunding at this point), what alternatives are there for a beginner?
The KDP model has given way to the neopatronage model on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
And what are our compatriots in the visual arts? Chopped liver?
I’ll plug one here. Here’s her masterwork in supervision to date:
https://www.imaginationredeemed.com/2022-gallery/glory-to-god-in-the-lowest
And here’s her website:
https://www.sarahphippen.con
It’s visual artists who are most excited about these advancements.
Just to be sure, I called her. Her opinion is more nuanced than I expected; here are the main sound bites.
“Generally speaking, you get what you pay for, and I can’t imagine something that easy is going to last for long.”
“There is something of the flawed nature of human beings that comes across in art, and it will always give the relative perfection of a computer sort of this sense of unreality, like the Matrix.”
But she doesn’t despise AI art altogether. That, she reserves for the people who think slapping an oil-paint filter on top of a photograph will work out.
As an artist who has been playing with AI as a tool (mmm Stable Diffusion), here’s my two cents:
The biggest problem I see right now with authors creating book covers with AI is that AI works at such low resolution. That’s it. That’s the biggest barrier to entry. Low resolution images look garbage in print. Now, if you paint over them to bring them up to a higher resolution, now you’re cooking with gas. Also, all the AIs actually produce art under license to the creator of the AI, so you don’t actually own anything you generate. That’s some litigation coming down the pipe in a few years. Painting over AI images is the way to go for now, I think. Artists definitely aren’t out of a job, they just have a valuable new tool they don’t know how to use yet.
Can confirm as a non-artist. I have specific images in my head, but even with AI I can’t realize them, because I lack the skill set to make that happen. “Good prompting” is not enough; look at the process I had to go through to make even a simple picture look the way I wanted.
https://aiartnyanzi.substack.com/p/controlling-the-result
A lot of good points here. Objectively speaking, I understand the AI lowering barriers to entry, helping the business, etc. I am not a visual artists, so perhaps my perspective is not a good one. I asked a professional artist friend if he thought AI was a threat. His answer, and I quote, was “not really.”
Interestingly, he seemed pretty indifferent about it all.
I agree with Rawle that it is here to stay. I also agree with you and David that it’s a tool. I get that. I still don’t like it, and it goes beyond the realm of book covers. Because I actually agree with you and David with regards to its utility for newpub; you guys make excellent points.
That said, I have a bad feeling that based on humanity’s track record with many other technological advances, it’s going to have a flattening effect on art, which will chase out the self-styled neurodivergent set we like to make fun of, but probably actually talented people too, or it’ll make those with potential decide not to bother. This parallels to popular music and it’s dumbing down and flattening, which is in part due to technology, and had affected the public’s taste and ability to discern objectively good music from bad. Technology quickly went from “tool” to “crutch.”
I’m interested in your perspective on this, leaving book covers aside, Brian. Also on how oldpub benefits from anti-AI-ism when their sales and quality are already shit.
A.I. art takes power away from oldpub. One of the big NY houses’ main pitches to new authors was “Sign with us and have your book’s cover designed by a real professional artist™!!”
Judging by the awful quality of oldpub covers, A.I. art algos present newpub with a golden opportunity to blow the Big 4 out of the water.
And as David V. Stewart pointed out in a recent livestream, publishing houses already use stock photos most of the time and don’t employ artists. AI art just replaces the stock photo with an original image; either way, the artist isn’t getting paid.
This is all reminiscent of a classic Roald Dahl horror story, “The Great Automatic Grammatizator”, about a publishing company that invents a book-writing machine and starts hiring out authors to sign on with them in exchange for a cut of royalties. The machine does the writing and it’s kept under wraps.
Worth pondering in a few years: How much of your favorite media is actually being written by who people say it’s written by?
To be fair, a lot of it isn’t now. Movies and TV shows are written and re-written so many times that it hardly resembles the original writer’s vision. Many books are ghost written by an anon pretending to be someone they’re not. Even media actually written by one person is filtered through Current Year tropes and checkboxes so they can have a platform in the first place.
How much of what we already consume is “real” right now?
Excellent point. The mass media focus groups are a kind of algorithm, since their outputs are predictable.
Sure. No argument from me.
A.I. art is not “generated” it is stolen art. The way they work is they generate the art using other examples of similar art downloaded in their database and then put them together to match what was inputted. People have been finding watermarks for artists in the generated art,
There is no debate, if you use A.I. generated art and are selling it you should be sued for copyright infringement. If I took this article and copied it then posted it on my own website with added I would be rightfully accused of plagiarism. Using A.I. generated art is the exact same thing.
You’re just wrong. A.I. art is in fact generated. There is no database. It’s a neural network with weights instead of neurons. It does not download anything and can work completely offline. Do more research before pontificating on my blog.
Nah, it’s like cnc machines 10 years ago or carbon fiber 20 years ago: people with zero engineering knowledge tout it as this huge thing, but it’s really just hack work mixed with intern drudgery at the end.
cnc work only replaces stuff you would have given to interns.
carbon fiber has so many downsides, planes made with it would shatter like glass in the air.
Can’t replace anything that requires value or real input. Same with ai.
As a reader, all I know is that book covers in recent memory have gotten really freaking boring (hey, it’s a guy/girl standing around…holding a sword…). I don’t think this controversy is going to result in us losing out on the next Frazetta because people with level of ability were frozen out of book covers and movie posters a long time ago.
One valid point made by the artists is that human art is of greater value and interest than AI art.
But that raises the question of why people are flocking to AI art, if it is of lesser value.
The answer is that while AI art may be of lesser value than great human art, it is better than mediocre human art, and various forces have caused mediocre art to dominate in nearly every field.
In some cases it was practically automated to begin with. The much maligned “corporate art style” uses simple geometric shapes, partially to scale well on various devices, but also so that it can be implemented even by artists of low ability. (Simple geometric shapes can be used to make pleasing and transcendent art, but that ain’t what we’re seeing in corporate art.) There is no real benefit to this type of art over having an AI do everything.
A lot of people arguing against this act like we’re missing out on the next Frazetta or the newest Ghostbusters, as if the industries of today haven’t already been deliberately passing them by for decades at this point.
It feels as if people still think we’re in 1997 and the stuff being “killed off” is still around, instead of the reality that it’s much later than you think.
Seeing lots of knee-jerk reactions based on fake zombie memes here.
To dispel the most common misconceptions:
>A.I. art algos do not steal art. They learn the approximate aesthetics of what an object is the more they see it.
>The A.I. algos do not keep databases of stolen images – the scrapers may, but not the neural nets that create the art.
>The idea that A.I. art will kill creativity is hard to swallow when the state of commercial art is so dismal. It’s just as likely that human artists working with these algorithms will free us from flat central image and corporate ugly design.
This controversy strikes me as a ginned-up outrage-of-the-week. Odds are nobody’s talking about this in two weeks.
>A.I. art algos do not steal art. They learn the approximate aesthetics of what an object is the more they see it.
I agree with you, Brian. Those who make the argument that AI “steals” art should be able to point to any AI piece and state what work or works were plagiarized to make that art.
First off, plagiarism doesn’t require AI, just copy-and-paste. Lots of people have rightly faced consequences for plagiarism, whether they used AI or not.
Second, what the AI does when it generates a picture is no different than what a human artist does when putting together their various influences to make an original piece. It’s not a collage of other people’s works, it’s generated by the tech.
If any work or works are plagiarized, it makes more sense to blame the plagiarist, not the tool.
The most commonly cited evidence by the “A.I. art is stealing!” crowd is a paid study that had Stable Diffusion copy the Mona Lisa. But it turns out that to get that result, they had to disable the algo’s creativity and put it on rails. Then they had to run through 10,000 generations with a supercomputer, which few professional artists and no kids dabbling on DA will have access to.
So yes, that proves A.I. can forge art – if you force it to behave 180 degrees contrary to its original specs and invest six figures in hardware. All that tells us is that hiring a professional forger is more time and cost-effective.
ai “art” is just cobbled together google images with a few filters run over them.
hacks have been doing that for years.