How AI Art is Changing Fantasy Book Covers
AI-generated art is accelerating rapid and easy image creation, but raises significant moral and ethical concerns among artists - especially as publishers use this technology for book covers.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly allowing for the rapid generation of stock images for book covers, creating effective summaries and blurbs for stories, and even coming up with fully-fledged plots. There’s just one issue: a lot of creatives aren’t happy about this. So, let’s talk about it.
And I know what you’re thinking, considering my first post kinda misled you into thinking it was going to be about BookTok but it was actually about Facebook.
Not this time. We’re actually talking about AI.
[An appeal by Jonas Jödicke, digital artist from Berlin, providing a comprehensive and informative overview of how AI art generators work and why AI cannot co-exist with digital artists. Instagram post by @jojoesart]
Why are you writing about AI, Sebastian? I thought you wrote about fantasy books?
That’s correct, I do! And this is directly related to fantasy — just bear with me.
I first came across AI in a fantasy context when I hopped onto Twitter – yes, I’m still refusing to call it the other name – and saw that controversy had developed overnight with the annual Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO) contest. Along with ranking the best of the books themselves, a cover contest is also conducted.
Now, imagine: you’re an artist who’s worked hard for years to create a fantastic book cover that nets you second place in this contest.
Then you find out that the winning artist’s cover was actually a collage made using Midjourney, a generative AI image system, and your heart sinks.
This is exactly what happened with Bob the Wizard, an entrant to the SPFBO contest who was met with accusations that the artist who created the cover had used AI. And unfortunately, once compelling evidence appeared, the silence from the artist was deafening.
Seeing all of this develop in real-time on Twitter was a bit of a shock to me. And what shocked me even more was Mark Lawrence’s decision to discontinue the contest for future years.
(It’s important to note that Bob the Wizard did receive a brand-new cover that’s a significant improvement on the previous one. So it’s a happy ending and not just a sad story.)
Fantasy Covers: A Retrospective
Now, admittedly, fantasy covers haven’t always been good. Even in 2014 people were recognizing just how truly shocking some covers were. For me, the peak of this will always be the UK covers of Brent Weeks’s Night Angel trilogy.
But AI generated covers have been seen across a number of big publishers too, with Tor coming under fire after fans discovered that Christopher Paolini’s new book – yeah, that guy who wrote Eragon, I know! – had developed a book cover that used AI elements purchased from a stock art site.
Tor themselves issued a statement of apology, acknowledging wrongdoing but also citing “production constraints” as a reason to stick with the cover.
[An apology posted by Tor Books’s official Instagram account regarding the use of AI-generated art assets in the cover for Christopher Paolini’s novel Fractal Noise. The apology itself was criticsed by many for being weak and tone deaf. Instagram post by @torbooks]
Bloomsbury publishing also came under fire when it became apparent that Sarah J. Maas’s paperback edition of House of Earth and Blood also had AI-generated elements. The Verge summed it up nicely: “Not even NYT bestsellers are safe from AI cover art”.
So why are big publishers using AI generated art? Is this an issue of them willingly taking away jobs from hard-working creatives & giving them to robot overlords?
Well, for an industry that historically underpays, overworks, and suffers from rampant inequalities and cost-cutting measures, it’s not a jump to think this is just another instance of the publishing industry being exploitative. There’s also major changes occurring in publishing that aren’t just related to AI that are significantly influencing these decisions.
[Alyssa Matesic gives a fantastic overview of recent changes in publishing, ranging from mergers to layoffs to diversity calls, highlighting significant and dramatic shifts. She has fantastic insight as a former editor for Penguin Random House and is well-positioned in the industry to note these changes. YouTube video by Alyssa Matesic]
However, it’s important to remember that both Tor and Bloomsbury noted that these were accidents and isolated incidents. And the methods by which they received these images is far from abnormal.
In fact, stock image characters and objects have been a staple for publishing for years now, and not just in fantasy. “Man in Fog” is a well-known and beloved stock image from 1935 that has graced many a cover of sleuth novels.
So why is this bad? Why is this worth writing about?
Well, for starters, it’s got some pretty damning implications for visual artists, designers, and aspiring creatives. Many are understandably furious about the advent of AI art generators being used in lieu of artists themselves, along with the theft of artists’ work through internet scraping.
[This is a fantastic overview on the ethics and morals of AI art from the perspective of a digital artist. Sam is a digital artist from Toronto and delivers a poignant and articulate dissection into AI, focusing particularly on the need for transparency and fairness in visual art compared to AI use in the music industry. YouTube video by SamDoesArt]
Morally, using AI-generated art in place of an artist is dubious at best, and outright wrong at worst. But some disagree, with many self-published authors and gurus sharing tips and guides on how to best use AI.
Are there other legal implications?
Oh yes, there definitely are. The U.S. saw a judge rule against copyrighting AI-generated art, citing the human-centric nature of copyrightable materials. Australia drew a similar conclusion, with the Arts Law Centre of Australia noting that, whilst legally safe at the moment, the importance of transparency and explainability would encourage users of AI to share this fact.
So what can we do as budding readers and writers of fantasy in the wake of all this technology?
Well, reading this has been a good start, and I’d encourage you to read the many links that I’ve included here. The Alliance of Independent Authors shared a fantastic article from John Doppler, which gives a fair and balanced review of everything.
It’s important to be informed of the valid criticisms of this technology and how it’s impacting artists and the publishing industry as a whole. One can only hope that everybody else decides that transparency is the best policy.
I definitely think it is.