The Controversy of AI Art in Book Cover Design
What I learned after working with many designers on my book cover
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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.
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.
For context, lots of creators on Tapas are comic artists. Many believe that AI generators will steal their jobs.
While I can sympathize, I don’t think AI could ever replace human artists. To me, AI is like Adobe Flash for animators. The program helps you make all the frames between the main pictures, but you still need to do the basic creation and direction yourself.
The strange incident with my book cover designers
Regardless, I decided to hire a designer to make a book cover for me. I went to 99Designs, a platform where you can host design contests.
Loads of designers can join in to make the designs and you pay the winner. You are the judge of the contest.
I wanted a dragon on my book cover. And guess what? Almost all the designers used an AI art generator to create a dragon image!
