Artificial intelligence for book covers

[CWNitz]

With all the talk about AI paintings, I've been wondering if it could be of any use to self-published writers, for book covers. While it doesn't fully replace the need for working on the design, it can produce cool concepts very fast for a cheap price. I think it's at least a step above Canva.

I've made a few experiments with Midjourney for my own novel, and this is what I've got this far:
https://assets.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:3b8b6ffb-bfe3-4d81-8eae-8e4bab9dec75?view=published (it's a bit pixelated)

Has anyone else tried it?

 

[LuciusW]

Haven't tried it, but I'm not gonna lie. That looks pretty neat.

As far as the use of AI for art goes... Out of principle, I'm against it.

 

[Chris P]

I'm on really slow internet at the moment, so I can't see the covers, but I love the idea. We had a thread this summer, and I posted the first lines of some classics (Huck Finn, Fear and Loathing) and got some amazing results.

 

[Brigid Barry]

I trust you so I clicked your link. Impressive! I'm curious what it could do across genres.

 

[CWNitz]

I trust you so I clicked your link. Impressive! I'm curious what it could do across genres.

It's actually much better at applying styles than at combining ideas or rendering shapes.

To clarify, I had the AI generate two images: the fennec and the forest background. Then I combined the two and added the title and name with Photoshop. So it's a bit like photomanipulation, except much easier because you start with a wide array of images with different styles.

 

[CWNitz]

Here is an example with a more "child-like" style: https://assets.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:933f4c12-7828-4a3f-9009-498c4a4d7c80?view=published

 

[Introversion]

I've made a few experiments with Midjourney for my own novel, and this is what I've got this far:
https://assets.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:3b8b6ffb-bfe3-4d81-8eae-8e4bab9dec75?view=published (it's a bit pixelated)

Has anyone else tried it?

Haven’t tried any of ‘em yet, but I do think it’ll be a boon for self-published authors. I love your cover, BTW.

 

[Little Anonymous Me]

I cannot contribute anything other than hype for your hypothetical covers, because omgsopretty

They definitely would catch my eye.

 

[Alessandra Kelley]

I have some friends who are experimenting with AI-generated illustrations for (small-scale) roleplaying games.

 

[Fi Webster]

As far as the use of AI for art goes... Out of principle, I'm against it.

As a visual artist myself—paper-&-glue collage, 100% analog—I'm having a hard time understanding what the controversy is about. Many artists already use digital devices and digital effects to a lesser or greater degree. Feeding text into one of these software packages can stimulate ideas or provide artistic "first drafts" to refine further by hand.

There's an aleatory quality to the results that appeals to me. (I sometimes use random number generators to choose images, to determine where I glue them down, and so on.) People always use tools and materials to make art. Software is just another tool, isn't it?

It's not like the AI is making aesthetic decisions for you! If you choose to take what the AI spits out and present it unaltered to the world, it'll suffer the fate of any other artwork: ignored, celebrated, reviled, and/or sold. =shrug= Should the artist make it clear they used software? Yes, but not for any ethical reason. Artists always include a brief note about what media or mix of media they use: acrylic paint, marble, gouache, steel, yarn, whatever. It's a convention.

Renowned artist-musician-writer Laurie Anderson has an intriguing piece of software that does the opposite of what these art-making AIs do: it turns pictures into text. From what I understand, she taught the software by feeding it a whole lot of her own poetry—the idea being to generate poems that're kind of in her style. She gives what it produces the classic rating by thirds: 1/3 is crap, 1/3 so-so, 1/3 surprisingly good. When she demonstrated it on 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper fed it a photo of his baby. The resulting poem was a little discursive for my taste, but it had one delightful little cluster of lines that moved Cooper to tears. I was impressed.

As for the possible image for CWNitz's book cover, I like it! The design of the crown is especially fun. I can easily see this becoming a thing for writers who either don't make art themselves or can't afford to hire an artist. Why not?

 

[CWNitz]

As a visual artist myself—paper-&-glue collage, 100% analog—I'm having a hard time understanding what the controversy is about. Many artists already use digital devices and digital effects to a lesser or greater degree. Feeding text into one of these software packages can stimulate ideas or provide artistic "first drafts" to refine further by hand.

I remember having exactly the same debate about digital painting. People used to say it was too easy because you can mix media, you have an infinite eraser, and you can save your work at various points. But after a few years, there are still painters who prefer traditional painting, and others who use both. My guess is that AI painting will be the same as digital painting: a tool that works for some people, but not everyone.

I tried Jasper for writing too, and the text it produced was just too rough for me. I didn't see the point of spending hours refining a chapter when I can write it from scratch easily. But I know some writers do just that, and if it works for them, great!

Renowned artist-musician-writer Laurie Anderson has an intriguing piece of software that does the opposite of what these art-making AIs do: it turns pictures into text. From what I understand, she taught the software by feeding it a whole lot of her own poetry—the idea being to generate poems that're kind of in her style. She gives what it produces the classic rating by thirds: 1/3 is crap, 1/3 so-so, 1/3 surprisingly good. When she demonstrated it on Sixty Minutes, Anderson Cooper fed it a photo of his baby. The resulting poem was a little discursive for my taste, but it had one delightful little cluster of lines that moved Cooper to tears. I was impressed.

That sounds interesting, I'll see if I can find that!

 

[Fi Webster]

I tried Jasper for writing too, and the text it produced was just too rough for me. I didn't see the point of spending hours refining a chapter when I can write it from scratch easily. But I know some writers do just that, and if it works for them, great!

A really long time ago I played around with some software for critique, supposedly designed to help writers in editing. You put a big chunk of words in it, then it would tell you things like "too many long sentences" or "not enough modifiers." Quite frankly, I can't recall exactly what it did. I'm sure there are much better versions these days.

What I do recall is that I had a blast feeding in like 5K words from Melville, Fitzgerald, Amy Hempel... The stupid critiques the software made about much-acclaimed gorgeous writing were hilariously wrongheaded.

 

[Alessandra Kelley]

As a visual artist myself—paper-&-glue collage, 100% analog—I'm having a hard time understanding what the controversy is about. …

At least some of it is that the AIs were “trained” using visual artworks that were under copyright, without the copyright holders’ permission and without any compensation or licensing.

As a result of having stolen the images of many artists, these AIs can now mimic those artists’ styles enough to put a dent in their already-meager earnings.

(I assume that as a working visual artist you are aware of just how poorly most artists are paid. I used to play a game of one-downmanship with my actor friends, because however legendarily meager actors’ annual earnings are, turns out they are about ten times the earnings of your median visual artist. Or were as of roughly twenty years ago, probably need to dig into the stats again.)

At least some of the upset is from visual artists who have discovered their works have been stolen for this.

 

[Gramps]

With all the talk about AI paintings, I've been wondering if it could be of any use to self-published writers, for book covers. While it doesn't fully replace the need for working on the design, it can produce cool concepts very fast for a cheap price. I think it's at least a step above Canva.

I've made a few experiments with Midjourney for my own novel, and this is what I've got this far:
https://assets.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:3b8b6ffb-bfe3-4d81-8eae-8e4bab9dec75?view=published (it's a bit pixelated)

Has anyone else tried it?

I've tried to artificially impart intelligence between the covers of the book. You know what they say...if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS, but the whole cover idea, I'd be open to the concept.

 

[Fi Webster]

I remember having exactly the same debate about digital painting. People used to say it was too easy because you can mix media, you have an infinite eraser, and you can save your work at various points. But after a few years, there are still painters who prefer traditional painting, and others who use both. My guess is that AI painting will be the same as digital painting: a tool that works for some people, but not everyone.

I've made some digital paintings on my iPad—a few of which turned out quite well. But I experienced such a steep learning curve for getting anywhere close to mastering all the things the software can do, I lost interest. "Feature bloat" is what I've heard it called. Even when I told myself I only needed to learn X, Y & Z, I got stymied trying to do just those.

I prefer to sit down at my work table and make art with my hands. It took me a long time (years!) to get good at that, too, but the learning process was a whole lot more fun than being exasperated with my iPad for hours on end.

 

[PastyAlien]

Haven't tried it, but I'm not gonna lie. That looks pretty neat.

As far as the use of AI for art goes... Out of principle, I'm against it.

At least some of it is that the AIs were “trained” using visual artworks that were under copyright, without the copyright holders’ permission and without any compensation or licensing.

As a result of having stolen the images of many artists, these AIs can now mimic those artists’ styles enough to put a dent in their already-meager earnings.

(I assume that as a working visual artist you are aware of just how poorly most artists are paid. I used to play a game of one-downmanship with my actor friends, because however legendarily meager actors’ annual earnings are, turns out they are about ten times the earnings of your median visual artist. Or were as of roughly twenty years ago, probably need to dig into the stats again.)

At least some of the upset is from visual artists who have discovered their works have been stolen for this.

Yeah, this.

Something I've experienced myself is that social media feeds are absolutely clogged with AI "art," to the point where I can no longer find works by traditional or digital artists. Even when I search for medium-specific tags like #oilpainting on Instagram, I get mostly AI art. It's starting to creep into Mastodon too. So artists hoping to sell art or land commissions are being absolutely buried by the very AI generators trained by the works these artists produced.

There was a huge backlash against DeviantArt because they were using a default opt-in setting on their site to train their new AI art generator, forcing artists to go into each work they had uploaded to opt out--if they were lucky enough to even be aware of it.

People who use a one-liner prompt to generate art are now calling themselves artists.

Those AI generated book covers were created on the backs of artists, who trained for years using real time and real money to learn their craft, and each AI-generated book cover will be a commission taken away from those same artists.

I wouldn't buy a book that had AI generated art on the cover.

Disclaimer: I'm a traditional artist, so probably biased.

 

[CWNitz]

I used to work as a designer, so I've done my fair share of paid illustrations, both in traditional and digital media. I was paid fairly (more than my sister who was a high school math teacher at the time).

I don't think people will magically start making covers with only AI. Most people won't be able to merge images or pick the right font, or even come up with a good concept. Otherwise, they would already be doing it with photo manipulation. It will only allow illustrators to work faster, and maybe for a few artistically inclined authors to make their own covers.

As for learning from copyrighted images, isn't that what all traditional painters do? When I started painting, I looked at paintings both in the Louvre and DeviantArt, and copied the techniques artists used. That's why you have trends.

 

[Fi Webster]

As for learning from copyrighted images, isn't that what all traditional painters do?

THIS. No artist, writer, musician, any creative person, works in a void—if they'd never encountered any other art, writing, music, whatever. It's impossible to be 100% original. Everyone "samples" to one degree or another.

I understand the objection to an art-making AI that is trained entirely with images from one living artist who's getting nothing in return from being copied. That may be the one novel question posed by this technology. It might make for an interesting lawsuit some day.

Are y'all familiar with the case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court about copyright in visual art? Lynn Goldsmith vs. Andy Warhol's estate? If you're interested in the question of how much can be borrowed from a previous work of art without trampling on the original artist's rights, I encourage you to check it out. There's been a lot of media coverage.

(Disclaimer: I'm coming from the point of view of being a collage artist who works with found images. Literally every single thing I cut out and glue down is a "sample" of something else, in most cases someone else's photography or someone else's art reproduced on paper. A lot of the images I use are free of copyright, but not all, by any means. It took me years to work out my personal ethical code about doing this. I won't bore you with it, but I've done a lot of reading and talking to other collage artists to arrive where I am.)

 

[PastyAlien]

I used to work as a designer, so I've done my fair share of paid illustrations, both in traditional and digital media. I was paid fairly (more than my sister who was a high school math teacher at the time).

I'm really glad you had those opportunities. But don't you see? You might not have them today if those commissions were replaced by AI-generated art.

I don't think people will magically start making covers with only AI.

They already are. People are setting up shop and selling AI art book covers to unsuspecting writers who think they're getting an original piece of digital art. Some people do make it clear that it's AI art, though. Problem is you can't copyright AI art, so anyone can re-use your cover art for their novel or to make T-shirts or mugs or whatever. And since AI art is the wild west, and copyright is unclear at the mo, there is a risk of being sued for using art that was generated by stealing artists' original work to train an AI generator.

And to top it off a Midjourney AI image won a prize at an art competition. So somebody who entered a few lines into a program won out over people who spent years honing their craft and spent money on materials.

Most people won't be able to merge images or pick the right font, or even come up with a good concept. Otherwise, they would already be doing it with photo manipulation. It will only allow illustrators to work faster, and maybe for a few artistically inclined authors to make their own covers.

See above. People who have these skills have already set up shop and are using AI art as the cover art.

As for learning from copyrighted images, isn't that what all traditional painters do? When I started painting, I looked at paintings both in the Louvre and DeviantArt, and copied the techniques artists used. That's why you have trends.

To me, a program being fed artists' works (without permission) to generate images that will negatively affect those artists' ability to make a living is unethical. An algorithm doesn't take years to hone a skill or need to purchase materials to make art; it can pump out an infinite number of images based on a prompt. I don't think you can compare that an artist who has been inspired by a piece of art and wants to learn the techniques by copying. You can't sell those copies anyway, because of copyright infringement. And you, as an artist, will have filtered what you've learned through the human experience to create something new. Your art will have a theme, a message; it will be an expression of yourself.

I think AI art can be done ethically. The generators can be trained on art that has come into the public domain. And instead of scraping copyrighted art from the internet, the programmers can obtain permission from artists and pay them.

 

[Unimportant]

Problem is you can't copyright AI art, so anyone can re-use your cover art for their novel or to make T-shirts or mugs or whatever. And since AI art is the wild west, and copyright is unclear at the mo, there is a risk of being sued for using art that was generated by stealing artists' original work to train an AI generator.

My gosh, I had no idea about any of this, but that particular factoid just blew my mind. What a frickin' minefield!

 

[Fi Webster]

I don't think you can compare that an artist who has been inspired by a piece of art and wants to learn the techniques by copying. You can't sell those copies anyway, because of copyright infringement.

I think you're right about all the points you make, except this part about not selling copies. There's a centuries-old tradition of artists setting up an easel in a museum, copying a painting, then selling the copy. I haven't been to a museum in a while, but you used to see them all the time. It was a way for starving artists to make a little cash and master technique at the same time.

When my family went to Europe in the 1960s, my mom brought back a painted copy of a Vermeer that she bought from such a freelance copy artist. It was not a forgery, because its being a copy was all above board and legal. Any expert in authenticating art would've immediately said, of my Mom's pseudo-Vermeer, "Obviously a copy, therefore not worth much."

What makes things even more complicated, with regard to living artists, is that there are plenty of companies using some sort of technology (I don't know how it works) to make copies, in acrylic on canvas, of paintings. They have the same brushstrokes, the whole "look" of the original. You can easily find them online.

I have no idea how the legal/copyright issues for either of those cases are resolved. I'm just reporting that sales of painted copies of paintings are as much a thing as sales of prints on paper of paintings. Maybe the artists or their estates license those vendors? I don't know.

 

[lizmonster]

I have no idea how the legal/copyright issues for either of those cases are resolved. I'm just reporting that sales of painted copies of paintings are as much a thing as sales of prints on paper of paintings. Maybe the artists or their estates license those vendors? I don't know.

There's a difference, though, with digital. A print of a painting isn't identical; a reproduction isn't identical either.

A digital copy can be absolutely identical, and in fact indistinguishable, from the original.

Ask professional photographers how this works for them.

 

[CWNitz]

An algorithm doesn't take years to hone a skill or need to purchase materials to make art; it can pump out an infinite number of images based on a prompt. I don't think you can compare that an artist who has been inspired by a piece of art and wants to learn the techniques by copying. You can't sell those copies anyway, because of copyright infringement. And you, as an artist, will have filtered what you've learned through the human experience to create something new. Your art will have a theme, a message; it will be an expression of yourself.

My guess is you're saying this because you didn't actually try to produce something specific with an AI. It's not free, you have to pay for the GPU you use. You need materials, the computer and the account, and probably Photoshop if you want something a bit more sophisticated. It's not unlimited. It does take time to find something that works. And you can have a theme or a message with something produced by AI.

Also, AI painting doesn't produce copies. In fact, you can feed it a specific image, ask for a copy, and it won't do it. It doesn't understand images well. I know because I tried feeding it my sketches and ask for an enhancement and it produced garbage.

 

[Unimportant]

I know because I tried feeding it my sketches and ask for an enhancement and it produced garbage.

Well, that could be because.....JUST KIDDING!

 

[CWNitz]

Well, that could be because.....JUST KIDDING!

Because they were already perfect and there was nothing to enhance?