After a few years of ignoring AI-based art generators, a few of the major players finally made a move that made them really interesting for me: they announced that the product of the digital minds could be licensed for commercial use.
This happened right as I was playing around with cover designs for a back list release, so I figured it was as good a time as any to see if an AI could generate a passable cover for one of the tricker books to get right with stock art images. The image above is my first real attempt, after playing around with some concepts and art styles.
They’re an imperfect tool, both because the art generated is basically a crapshoot and because the software typically has some prohibited terms. Asking the mad robot artist for a unicorn scull on a desk surrounded by bullets or revolver was prohbited, for example, although asking for a painting using the key words unicorn skull, detectives cluttered desk, noir ended up with something usable after a little time in photoshop.
This isn’t a tool I’d necessarily turn to for a major release , particular for Brain Jar, as it’s neither accurate enough nor…well, at my level, pretty enough to make for a great cover. But not everything is a major release – sometimes, books get put out *in case* someone wants to buy them in a particular format. There’s already perfectly viable singles copies of both Horn and Bleed, the two Miriam Aster novellas, out there with some pretty damn gorgeous cover art commissioned by the original publisher.
What doesn’t exist – and what I hold the rights to produce – is a book that collects them together. And I suspect the above will be enough for folks who may be interested. I’m still pondering it for another few days, while I dig into the minutia of the AI system I’m building with, but it’s definitely got some potential.
On the other hand, AI software is still an untest territory so far as copyright is concerned. Just beacuse the software developers are granting commercial use rights, it doesn’t mean that its clear terrain. Copyright law has a lot of precedents around art needing to be generated by human intelligences – something that’s come up in elephant generated art and photographs taken by monkeys – and early test cases are suggesting AI creations aren’t copywritable.
Similarly, there’s the ethical side of things: AI software is trained by feeding countless images and artists work into the learnign program and teaching it to make connections, and there’s still plenty of concerns – both legal and ethical – about how those things are spat out the other side.
So while I’m playing here, it’s not a guarentee that it’s the cover I’ll go with in the end (although its’ defintely cheaper and faster than my next option).
For the curious, some of the other AI creations it coughed up while I was playing with Miriam Aster images are included below.
