A note on “AI” art and my book covers

Published on June 21, 2024 Published by John Scalzi

So, damn it, it looks like an art generated by “AI” has made its way onto one of my covers, namely the cover of the Italian edition of Starter Villain. Some (real human) artists tracked down the cover and (at least on Adobe’s stock art site) it is marked as “created using AI.”

It is my policy not to accept AI-generated images as final covers, and I thought my team and I had communicated that widely. When this image was presented to me for approval, I assumed it was done by a human and approved it, so that’s on me.

And by “on me,” I mean I don’t want to look askance at my Italian publisher or his art people. The choice of this image was made several months ago, and not every stock art site (and this stock art is on more than one site) labels their available stock art as “AI generated” then or now. It’s possible that this was chosen in the belief it was created by a real person. Likewise, it’s possible that my “No AI” policy fell through a crack somewhere between here and Italy. Basically, there are plenty of places something could have fallen off without assuming any bad intent on anyone’s part. These are explanations, mind you, not excuses. If you want to blame someone for this, you’ll have to blame me. My name is on this cover.

So here’s what I’m currently doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again, and to mitigate some of the harm that AI-generated art is causing to local people.

1. I have instructed my agent (who passes the instruction on to the next place) that all book contracts going forward must stipulate that the cover must be created by a human artist. Using stock art is permitted, but stock art must be human-created, not AI-generated. We expect our contracting partners to do due diligence to ensure that these terms are met (for example, by only using stock art sites that disclose when the image was AI-generated). I would like to point out that Tor has already agreed to this, so this is no longer just a policy, but a hard contractual point.

2. I have donated to the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists, specifically their sponsored memberships for BIPOC artists, to help emerging artists from marginalized communities benefit from the professional and artistic community that the ASFA can provide. They will need it for this new era of art making.

Keep in mind that even with this contract point, it’s getting harder to keep “AI” generated art off covers, especially when using stock art; not everything will be labeled and not everything will be immediately obvious as AI generation becomes more sophisticated. And it’s likely that the definition of “AI generated” will change over time. But it’s worth being vigilant and still having “human-created” as a contract point, if only to ensure that there’s a human artist on the other end of the coin benefiting from their skill and effort. That’s important to me.

— JS

(PS: Comments on this entry can be a bit weird. I tried to add one and got an error message. If you experience the same thing, don’t panic, I’ll look into it. In the meantime, the additional comment I wanted to make:

“For anyone who wants to comment on the ‘AI’ features in drawing programs, Photoshop, etc., I would like to point out that I think there is a clear creative difference between using these programs as tools to enhance human creativity or as a replacement for for human creativity. If you can’t tell the essential difference between them, that’s your fault.”)