The Controversy of AI Art in Book Cover Design

What I learned after working with many designers on my book cover

AI image generated by author via Nightcafe

Recently, I had an AI art experience that left me stunned and bewildered. It made me think more deeply about the complexity of AI ethics.

But before we get to that, here’s my backstory.

For a while, I had cross-posted my serial novel, Anastasia the Nonbinary Dragon, onto Tapas, a platform for web novels and webcomics. I like to be optimistic, but Medium has a small audience for fiction, especially serial fiction.

The book cover I used for Tapas. I based this on an image by estebande on DepositPhotos, where I have the standard license for commercial use. A friend helped me modify the image with Midjourney AI.

Tapas felt like a miracle, because readers there actually enjoy serial fiction, and our novels are packaged neatly into little bundles. We don’t have to awkwardly link blog posts together like we do on Medium. Tapas has monetization options, too, which Bradan Writes Stories explains in his article here.

But alas, good things never last.

Near the end of January this year, Tapas announced that AI art is now banned from book covers. We had to remove all AI art from our work by Feb 6, or we would be penalized.