That screaming you hear is from the servers of AI grinding the bones of book cover illustrators. Just to add more salt to this wound, this article’s outline was generated by Perplexity AI. But I completely ignored its outline, which could be biased, even just a little.
The words you’re reading are mine, with a small dash of Hunter S. Thompson to give it them some bite. Just because the AI gave me an outline doesn’t mean I need to stay within its lines. I’m still the human in the loop. For now, anyway. By the way, the illustration for this article was also generated by Perplexity. You can stone me later. For now, just keep reading.
AI is coming for your job, man! That’s the bottom line, end of your story. Music, graphics, real humans writing real articles instead of robo-ridden slush, all of that’s fading away like a Picasso left out in the sun. Soon enough we’ll all be like Charlie Chaplain caught up in the gears of that monstrous machine, or one of the worker-drones in Metropolis, slaving away at the gears of that monstrous machine while whatever it produces, without any human skin in the game, nor human experience, nor human sweat, nor human experience’s highs and lows, sucks the electricity out of us non-cloud city dwellers to deliver, like a Dasher pumped by a large tip, what we used to pay skilled people for.
Those people include book cover designers. They are easy pickings. A few prompts and bazinga! you got a robot drawing a monster, although the AI is the digital illustrator (digistrator?), not you, me, or the robot. Not yet, anyway. You can’t even call it a drawing, can you? I hear some voices in the back row saying “but, book cover designers can use AI to empower their work right?” Sure, sort of, but any Tom, Jane, and Harry can now be empowered to generate their own book covers. No waiting. No back and forth tweaking. No expensive fees. Just a relatively slight fee for access to AI, a few good prompts, and (yeah, bazinga! again) who needs the expert when everybody thinks they can be the expert.
If you’re a writer independently producing a quality book (not the AI mush we are being inundated with), you can just try your luck at creating a cover for it and save some money (umm…pretty much what I did, the cover I mean). The only thing is you are just generating a cover, not creating one, just because you got lucky and wrote a good prompt that let’s the AI whip up a masterpiece in ten seconds or less. Being able to put words together like an adult is why you’re a writer in the first place, so that’s a given. Think of it: all you need is a good sentence or paragraph to describe what you want and–dare I say it again? Bazinga! Instant gratification delivered without much effort. No years of training and cleaning brushes. No climbing up that ladder to become good at it and fending off the competition. It’s just a quick save into a graphic file and there you go. Who else will hear the AI sing?
Of course, having artistic training does empower you to use the prompting and post-editing to most effect. Meanwhile, what we’re seeing now, without that artistic slant, are a lot of generic and repetitive works being dumped into the mainstream. But first it begins with prompting. At what point will AI start prompting us? Now that will be the rub that stings.
Commercial interests will keep AI moving ahead. We will use it to analyze the trends and most successful avenues of development to generate questionable fiction, non-fiction, and book covers for the bucks and mass appeal. Those with skills will use it to enhance their output. Those without skills will use it to generate pablum, force-feeding a saturated market with mediocrity that relies on mass quantities instead of singular quality.
Lucky us. So for now we adapt. For later, when the AI adapts to us, who knows?