The same eggheads who said the internet would end censorship, Bitcoin would end state coercion, and Google thermostats would end global warming have also been telling us the A.I. revolution is 10 years away for 50 years now.
But the advent of A.I. drawing algorithms like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion has professional illustrators sweating.
See this video for a demo of what an indie author can do with this technology in a couple hours on a Saturday afternoon:
And David’s just showing you the basics there. I’ve seen the kind of output these programs are capable of when you start playing with more advanced settings. Training the algo how you want it takes time. But after that, you can turn out professional-grade book cover art in less time than it would take to communicate the specs to an artist.
Let’s get back down to Earth for a minute. “A.I.” is just a marketing catchphrase here. These programs aren’t self-aware. What they are is sophisticated decision trees pruned and shaped by users.
But are they good enough to replace professional illustrators?
The lazy, unimaginative, and overpriced ones, yes.
“Not so fast!” you may hear artists online say. “Authors shouldn’t get too smug. Because A.I. writing programs are coming for you. They’re even winning poetry contests!”
Until recently at least, they were also shitting out word salad like this:
“That was years ago,” the common objection goes. “Writing A.I. is way smarter now.”
Is it?
Top ghostwriter Joshua Lisec took to Twitter in an effort to shed light on writing A.I.
Using -ly adverbs is to writing what blinking and sweating are to testifying in court.
This is the silver bullet right here. Because everyone in the know I’ve talked to – including at least one author who contacted the US Copyright Office – says you can copyright A.I.-generated art. You just have to do something transformative to it to get it out of the public domain. Which pretty much means running it through Photoshop. But that’s way easier and quicker than editing an A.I.-generated manuscript for mood, tone, and persuasive power.
Back to Joshua for the final word …
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