AI or not AI? That is the question.

I have seen many Social Media posts praising and decrying the use of AI for creating book covers. Now, I am not a great fan of AI in general, but what do you think?

Last year, the publisher of my book, The Nurses, collapsed due to its owner being, shall we say, not a fit and proper person (He is now in prison).

Anyway, I am on my own again, and I have absolutely no clue as to how to create a book cover.

Then I discovered ChatGPT. With nothing to lose, I had a go.

Now, some comments, mainly from those who do know how to use digital imaging, said they would never read a book if the cover had been created using AI.

My response to that is that it would literally be judging a book by its cover!

SO, my question is this. Would you use AI to create your book cover?

Here is my creation:

For a book cover, I would likely commission an actual human artist (I have ideas, in fact). My prompting skills are fine for SS and (redacted) cover images but for a book cover, I would hold myself to a higher standard that I am not sure I could pull off. That's not to say good AI covers are not possible, just that I am not sure I am the one to pull it off. And, frankly, in an era where jobs may be on the line due to AI, if I was putting money into a project like a book, I would like to see a human get some of it.

That said, yours looks pretty dang good. I can definitely peg it as AI (women's faces generated by AI have a same-i-ness about them, for one thing) but it wouldn't put me off. I think part of the problem is writers thinking they don't need to put effort in, just write a prompt and use the results. So you get crappy covers that really give AI covers a bad name. I don't see that in yours, as I say, but you don't need to spend much time looking at Kindle or other e-pub services to realize a decent to good AI-generated cover is more of an exception than a norm.

I tend to agree with Mendalla's overall comment, but with some riders. The first is affordability. I can't afford to pay for a cover artist at this stage, and my abilities with computer graphics are zero.

I am also not a fan of AI.

However, I experimented with the free version of ChatGPT. It was a long, but interesting process. The trick is how to explain in words what I wanted to create.

I commanded ChatGPT to make the women identical, which is the premise of the story. However, to not make it too obvious, I asked for specific hairstyles.

Then, I had to recreate the collar brooches as it wouldn't allow me to upload a photograph of the original, which includes swastikas. I am not 100% pleased with them, but it was the best I could achieve.

Anyway, several days later (the free version only allows limited access per day), I was reasonably happy with the result.

The easy bit, once the first cover was created, was to adapt it for the second and third books.

This is how they turned out: