I recently wrote this post about a book cover for a non-JJ Rose book, about how I hired an artist and I had fears her art was AI-generated. I eventually confronted her, and while she tried to give me an explanation about why an AI detector would ping her work as AI, I still wasn’t sure. I told her my concerns, and she offered to cancel the order and refund my money. I accepted, and she did as she’d promised, and now I have a credit in my Fiverr account for future use.

I also discovered that Partner 1’s daughter is a digital artist, so I asked her to take a crack at the cover. Just so you have an idea of the differences between AI and a human, here’s a tiny bit of the AI image:

And here’s the same part, drawn by a human:

When you look at the two images, you can easily see what a friend of mine told me is called the “piss filter” (which is just a gross term if you think too hard about it) on the AI image, and you can also see that in the human-drawn image there are no smears on the side of the sneaker. I’d love to show you the rest of the image, but you’ll just have to trust me that she’s done a good job making sure it looks like a human did it by hand.

I’ve asked the artist to finish the entire image by early October — I want to put this book out into the world by Thanksgiving — and I’m hopeful she can do it. The typesetting is done (both print and Kindle versions) so really the cover is the last thing that needs to be done.

The larger problem here isn’t that I mistakenly hired an AI artist; the problem is that people on Fiverr lie about not using AI in their images and expect you to believe them. I wish it was okay to use AI art without a stigma, because I really do like the AI cover that the Fiverr artist generated, but I know the stigma would keep the book from being seen as something people should want to read. I believe that artists should be paid for their work, and I’m more than happy to pay people who do actual art (like the woman who did the In Her Hands cover), but if all you’re doing is prompt engineering, well… I can do that myself.