So, I’ve been trying for many months now to create concept art for Rev, the protagonist of my new novel series, using AI tools. I’m really just doing this as an excuse to learn the tools, since the legality of AI art on book covers is a bit nebulous. 

If you are unfamiliar with AI art, basically, you feed the program a line of text, and it comes back with something. For example, here’s the line I used in my first attempts:
noir tall, strongman native american private detective with short hair in a business suit

And here’s four examples of what the AI produced:

You’ll notice, three of these have what I call ‘AI strangeness’; an uncanny-valley kind of feeling you get when you look at them because something is subtly wrong. But the top left one is pretty darn good, he just isn’t big enough to be Rev. 

Anyway, I kept playing around until I finally found a prompt that got me something I’m mostly happy with:

His face in this image is a little too ‘pretty’, and his hair is a bit too long, but otherwise I was quite impressed. 

And that’s my big takeaway with AI art. It can do some pretty impressive stuff, but it’s really inconsistent, and there’s almost always something subtly wrong.

Anyhow, if you’d like to play around with AI art, you can do so using Midjourney, DALL-E, or NightCafe. I created these with NightCafe, mostly because they give you free credits every day than for any other reason.