All book series published up until now (Lords of Atlantis, Onyx and Carnelian Dragons, Blades of Arris, Mark of the Icarus) have no AI used in any part of the text, editing, copy-editing, translation, or in any other aspect involving words.
The original covers of Lords of Atlantis, Onyx and Carnelian Dragons, and Blades of Arris are also not AI. They were made by human artists altering/overpainting stock or 3d-rendered images before AI art existed.
I have a folder of unused covers and art that was purchased in 2023 or before that is also pre-AI, and hopefully someday I’ll finish the stories and these will see the light!
However I am a techno-optimist and since 2023 I have used AI in the following ways:
- Search assistance to check character details (ex eye color, hair color of minor characters) to ensure consistency
- Generating art elements and stock for marketing images, covers, interior pages, associated materials
- Creating marketing plans, selecting book passages to fit themes, converting lines into quote-images, images to video
- Writing code to produce forced edges and split text for uploading to websites
- Digital narration
For me, using AI has been another step in my independent author journey toward greater control.
How I got here
TLDR: Some human contractors ghosted/upset me while I was undergoing cancer treatments and I shook my fist as the sky and vowed never to go hungry artistically again.
As an artist in physical media (watercolor, charcoal, pottery) I took a photoshop class in 2013 so I could make my own book covers. And…one photoshop class did NOT make me a very good digital artist! I made a few (10-15) truly terrible covers before determining I must hire this out if I wanted anyone to read my books. However I continued making covers here and there (for bonus or free stories) while I learned about typography, filters, channels, etc.
By 2019 I was making a lot of cover-adjacent art for Facebook posts, and by 2021 I was struggling to find cover artists who could do what I wanted — the market had shifted from hot manchests to object and typography covers. I waited over 9 months on a very expensive cover artist, 6 months for a different (also expensive!) cover artist, and hired two other cover artists, all for 4 different projects, and NONE of them ended up being able to produce an object or typography cover I really loved, which was very frustrating for me at the time. In addition to spending thousands of dollars and delaying publishing a new series by nearly a year while on their waitlists, seeing the beautiful work they did for OTHER authors but not for me (sob) was very upsetting. So, even before AI art arrived, I was trying to make my own book covers again.
Also during this time, I got hit very unexpectedly with cancer. (Very mild! Luckily. Is that a thing? Mild cancer?) In the middle of treatments in 2022, I was ghosted by a contractor and ignored by the company that had hired that person. It was really bad timing, and I hadn’t realized how much of my mental health was then hinging on “I can’t control anything else in my life but at least I can control my next launch.” Which, of course, any author knows is a mistake as a launch is something you absolutely canNOT control, but it kicked off the period of my life when I became barely able to function, from easily writing five books a year to struggling to get out one, and then watching it go out with a cover I didn’t love in a series that I felt really unhappy about.
In 2023, still exhausted by treatments, I heard about Midjourney and I was impressed. For social media posts I started photoshopping their images rather than images from stock photo sites, but I struggled to generate images I really liked. It was just a fun thing to do when I couldn’t write.
Around this time I also heard about using AI for writing, so I took a couple classes, but all the generated text was simply awful. It had a LONG way to go to rewriting the works of Shakespeare.
In 2024 I finally finished up my last series and started a new series. This time I decided to do the cover art myself. I mashed up AI art I generated from multiple different websites (Midjourney, Bing, Ideogram) expanded with Canva’s AI and put through Magnific.ai to upscale/retexture before bashing it all together in Photoshop. Even though I spent weeks mocking up different styles, it felt great when I finally hit the one that felt like a “Yes, this is it.” And if it doesn’t sell, I literally have no one to blame but myself.
This feeling of power also gave me the impetus to try more things. I hired someone to do forced edges, and when the final product wasn’t optimized for printers, Copilot and ChatGPT helped me to code python to fix it myself. I hired human narrators for the audiobook and they did amazing. I even got on a couple of cover artists’ waitlists because I want *their* art and those projects can wait.
I started testing out AI for my writing again. So far, I’ve ended up rewriting everything that’s been generated, but it’s given me a lot of hope that I can soon work *with* the AI to get all my long-dormant books and story ideas out into the world. That’s my ultimate goal with AI writing — to write all 300+ story ideas — as so far in my career I’ve only written approximately 7. 🙂
How can I live with myself?
Overall I am a techno-optimist. I still want to believe in the Star Trek future where everyone enjoys Universal Basic Income and joins Starfleet because they crave the excitement and adventure of exploring the universe, not because they need health insurance.
But we’re living in the real world right now, so here are the most common arguments against AI I’ve seen:
AI is taking jobs — I know of two people in creative fields whose jobs were lost due to AI or AI-adjacent things, so I feel this is true.
AI will take YOUR job — Before AI there were hundreds of books published PER DAY by human authors, plus Wattpad and AO3 *exist*, so I feel for my particular job of selling my paranormal and science fiction romance books, this is false.
AI is destroying the environment — TLDR: This is true but I feel my particular use is no more destructive than most other aspects of modern life. Hopefully it will be reduced further as time goes on.
Longer answer: I voted for Al Gore to save the environment in 2000 and it required my dad to mail my ballot overseas and me to cross Athens to get to the US embassy to cast my vote from abroad. It took 6 hours by public transport, and I did it. I now have solar panels, electric cars, and shop local. I care about this issue A LOT. Energy generation is the top pollution source (second is transport) and AI uses a ton of energy. I WISH THE GOVERNMENT WOULD REGULATE THIS. Many AI companies are trying to reduce their resource usage to operate more cheaply. Amazon is supposedly investing in nuclear power nearby. Because of this, I feel my personal AI usage is no more destructive than many other aspects of modern life, and will hopefully still be reduced further as time goes on.
AI steals/stole art — TLDR: I don’t know enough about what happens behind the curtain, but if it’s just “training” then I think it’s fair use.
I am told that AI writing is basically a really expanded form of “autocorrect” and that AI art is somewhat the same. Their decision of what words or pixels to put next is determined by their “training database.” So if the training database had all the works of the English language, then starting with the phrase “Love is” could cause the AI to choose the next words “patient, love is kind” or “a battlefield” or even “a many-splendored thing” whereas if the training database only contains the works of Shakespeare it would likely continue “not love which alters when it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove”. If this understanding is correct, then the bigger the training database, the more options there are. I do not think that “viewing” or even “digitally encoding” a work is a violation of copyright. I sided with Google during their 2005 digitizing project. But I also thought the monkey selfie should’ve gotten the photographer a copyright because he set up the conditions under which the selfie was taken, and a judge disagreed, so I could very well be wrong.