Love it or hate it, AI art seems to be here to stay. This is a fairly touchy subject amongst artists and authors, some of whom are (justifiably, I believe) concerned about their livelihoods. Also, the legality and copyright issues around AI art are up in the air at the moment due to the way AI generates the images (it basically samples copyrighted work and remixes the images).

Now, I can see both sides to this issue, and I use human generated images for all of my covers. I do this mostly for a solid business reason: Cover artists are professionals with expertise in creating covers that sell in the chosen genre. AI is not.

Sure, AI might have been trained on best-selling covers, but it doesn’t actually understand any of the things that make that cover good. It simply quasi-randomly combines aspects from a lot of different art to create something new. So in order for me to choose a good AI generated cover, I also have to have expertise in cover design. I do not, so I hire a pro.

All that said, I have to learn these AI tools for my day job anyway, since we are using them to generate base images that our artists Photoshop on the way to them becoming marketing collateral. And since I’m learning it, I thought I’d experiment with some scenes or images from the books, just in case I can use them in a Facebook ad.

Now, I’ve been using NightCafe, mostly because it’s effectively free (they give you five credits per day for free, which ads up rapidly), but my boss paid for a subscription to Midjourney this week, so I’ve been playing with it. All of the images below were generated with Midjourney.