Why Your Story SUCKS | Writer's rants & discussions

Why your AI cover sucks

There's been a huge surge of new AIs growing in popularity... ChatGPT, Writesonic... And for art, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Dall-E, and countless other apps and sites for it.

There's been plenty of debates about where AI lies within copyright laws and some lawsuits to AI creators/companies and I'm not going to get into them because there's no way I could cover all of them thoroughly enough in this and it isn't my main topic. So i suggest everyone go educate themselves on this matter separately.

Now, of course, this surge in AI has reached writers, whether it be using AI to write for them or using it for their covers. I keep seeing more and more AI book covers, hell, there's people selling AI book covers. And it makes me cringe.

UmM bUt I usE aI fOr mY cOveRs cAusE i CanT dO pHotO eDiTiNg!!!! Great news! I have this super cool thing I discovered called graphic shops! I mean, going to the search bar and typing in "graphic shop" is a really rad thing you can do on this site. Like who knew there were hundreds upon hundreds of human-run graphic shops by people with out-of-this-world talent and skills for turning regular photos into manipulated works of art? AND FOR NO MONETARY COSTS TOO?! Goddamn!

While AI art has advanced a lot, it still isn't ethical. AI art has to source things to generate. So, this means taking art from real human artists and using it to virtually copy their styles/mix them into a 20-fingered monstrosity of AI artwork.

So many people who defend it will go to lengths saying things like this is simply the next wave of creation and human artists need to just accept AI is doing something they can't, human artists have no right to be upset they're losing money with lack of commissions, or they posted their work online so they have no right to be mad their style has been used by AI now.

And yet, people want to parade around showing off their AI "artwork", telling how many generations it took to get oh so perfect, or try to sell it. AI art has also pushed human art pages upon pages back on paid stock sites and on social media apps like Pinterest, Instagram, DeviantArt, and elsewhere. As a graphic designer myself, trying to find real resources buried in AI art made for free by someone on their PC, on a site I fucking pay for sucks.

So to now see shitty AI art pushing down Wattpad's community of graphic designers and knowing Wattpad will probably never do anything about AI work on their site as long as they don't get in legal trouble, is saddening. 

There is never an excuse to use AI art for a book cover when there are so, so many people who can create amazing stuff with their actual talent. Even outside of wattpad, tons of ways to find graphic designers or ways to learn how to make shit yourself. I promise you it isn't impossible to learn real editing, even if you only have a phone.