AI and All That Jazz

Alright, I guess it’s time to talk about AI a bit. I’ve put it off for long enough.

If you’re vaguely involved in book/writing Twitter and/or observing the upcoming SPFBO 9 competition, you may have seen some controversy regarding the cover competition. I don’t want to get into that specific issue too much – it’s very much still being discussed by people far more qualified than I, and some people (predictably) are taking things too far in accusations and all that normal Internet nonsense.

 But to summarise where things are at as of 10am this morning:

SPFBO book cover wins cover contestPeople think it might be AI –not allowed under contest rulesArtist says it isn’t AI, posts original Photoshop files to prove itPhotoshop file contains a bunch of AI imagesBook cover is withdrawn from contest(Update as of 11.30am) Book cover is disqualified under contest rules – and no more cover contests in the SPFBO

That’s the recent drama. But it’s far from the first instance of ‘AI covers on SF&F books controversy’, and not the most high-profile either. Christopher Paolini’s new book Fractal Noise was published with a cover based on an AI stock image. The UK edition of House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas did the same. These are pretty high-profile works – and they’re out there, now, with those covers, and most people likely have no idea.

And of course it’s not like people aren’t trying to use AI to write as well as do visual art. Someone made a (very bad) children’s book using AI back in December, and Clarkesworld, Grimdark and several other magazines have all had to close submissions to deal with a flood of AI-generated stories.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and a lot of other people have said it better than me, but I’ll have a go at articulating what I think about all this.

Firstly: simply writing a prompt for an AI is not ‘creating art’. You are putting no effort in whatsoever. It’s not yours. If I were to just type ‘third boiling seas book’ into ChatGPT, the result would not be any work of mine. (I haven’t, by the way, and I never will.)

But how much AI involvement is needed before something counts as ‘AI art’? Generating a whole image in MidJourney is obviously not involving any human effort. But the SPFBO cover in question is a collage/combination piece, using multiple images layered and combined in Photoshop to create a new one. Artists have been doing this with non-AI images for years. If some of the images in a collage piece are AI-generated but there’s still a human putting it together, is that overall ‘AI art’?

I don’t have an answer. Such art makes me uneasy, and I don’t like it, but I don’t feel qualified to decide what is and isn’t human ‘art’.

But that brings me onto a second point: passing off a thing you’ve made using AI as fully your own work is also not ok. The SPFBO rules are clear that no AI input is allowed at all, and I agree with that. If people really want to read AI-generated fiction – which, I mean, you do you, but right now it sucks – or look at AI art, then they can. But it should be made obvious that it is an AI work.

Which is a problem, currently, because while various stock-photo sites have clear rules about either not uploading AI art at all, or clearly tagging it as such, loads of people are ignoring those rules, and their stuff is getting through. I experienced this personally, recently, when the editors of Etherea Magazine realised that the stock photo they’d picked for the latest issue (the one with me in it) was an AI image. They switched it, and all is well – but as an experiment I tried looking on stock sites for alternatives, and so many of them were clearly AI but not properly labelled.

(And kudos to Aidan over at Etherea for being very open about their own dilemmas on using AI art and the difficulties of not doing so in this day and age – it’s worth checking out Etherea’s site and Twitter to see that reasoning.)

It is getting harder and harder to tell what is AI and what isn’t at a glance – hence the SPFBO controversy.

My third point is rather important to me personally, as a low-level writer and freelancer: if you’re a big publisher, and you’re sorting out cover art, why are you even considering using AI? TOR is a big SF name; Christopher Paolini is a huge author and has been for years. Why would they even use a stock photo for a cover rather than actually commissioning an artist – let alone using an AI image?

I use stock photos for some of my own covers – Blackbird and Nightingale, and I’ll use them for Boiling Seas 3 because I hate it when series change cover art direction halfway through. But that’s because I’m making those covers myself, for books that have sold a few hundred copies at most, and because I do not have much money. And even then, I’ve commissioned artists to do my other book covers (Ad Luna and The Fire Within). If I, a lowly indie author, can do that, then TOR has no excuse.

Because that’s one of the things that’s scaring artists and writers like me. Not just that our work will be outsourced to an AI, but that AI will be considered the cheaper and easier option than hiring actual humans, by publishers and other companies who could very easily afford to hire an actual human, but won’t, because capitalism.

I know it’s not a new take to say that this scares me. But it’s getting worse. Until recently I’d had the comfort of knowing that AI writing, at least, is pretty bad. But the leaps and bounds in AI visual ‘art’ over just the last few weeks, let alone months, make me wonder how long it’ll be before ChatGPT and the other ‘writing’ AI can put out something genuinely convincing.

Maybe it’s already happened and nobody’s noticed.

And it sucks, because part of me thinks that this AI revolution is cool as hell. Sure, it’s basically a very sophisticated predictive text algorithm, but it’s a step towards the genuine artificial intelligence that fills so much of the genre I love. There are genuine, awesome applications of this tech which could make the world a better place. I want to love it.

But I’m scared of it instead, because it’s being used for the wrong things. It’s being used to screw over occupations that really didn’t need more screwing over. And it’s only going to get worse.

So: pay artists, real human artists. Don’t try and pass off others’ work as your own, AI or not; don’t lie. And if you’re a creative, do your work yourself.

Just because it’s convenient doesn’t make it right.