What if publishers, like, didn't use AI? (Misshelved #11)
We live in a world where people steal fan fiction written by other people, scrub the author’s name, and upload the stories to Amazon. We live on a planet where shady NFT companies steal and sell digital art while sharing none of the profits with artists. We live in a universe where the value of handcrafted work, from fiber arts like knitting and embroidery to metalwork and jewelry, is diminished because machines in factories can make cheaper, poorly crafted versions that are sold for lower prices.
Whether their work is textual, digital, or made with physical materials, artists across the full spectrum of creative expression routinely have their work devalued or outright stolen, even as they themselves are abused for daring to say that what they do is worthy of a living wage, of credit, of respect.
With that said: AI “art” generators suck, and book publishing should stay the hell away from them.
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1960's Futurists: Automation will free mankind from meaningless tedium to focus on creative pursuits only human beings can master.
2020's Techbros: We're building AI that will write all your books, music, and TV so you can focus on the meaningless tedious of your cubicle job. - Patrick S. Tomlinson on Twitter
Oh, Tor.
Here is where the problem starts: the cover of Christopher Paolini’s next book, Fractal Noise, was first revealed by i09 in November 2022. On December 16, Tor finally admitted the reason why readers had felt the cover didn’t look quite right: They had used AI-generated “art” to create the cover image.
Fractal Noise is the first book cover to use an AI-generated image, but I know, thanks to friends in publishing, that it won’t be the last. At least one other publishing company has a cover that uses AI-generated images that they plan to unveil in the coming months.
Readers reacted to the Paolini cover with disgust, and rightly so. As of right now, there’s no way to guarantee ethical art creation using AI generators. Most use the LAION-400M data set; though branded using the friendly phrase "freely accessible," the set pulled its data by crawling websites and absorbing images from random web pages posted between 2014 and 2021. Artists have only recently begun to develop ways to opt their artwork out from data sets into which it’s been absorbed, but because of how these data sets poach information, it’s almost impossible to track down every file that might have been used to train the AI generators. (If you’re an artist reading this, here’s a great post about preventative measures to stop future art from being used in AI generators.) Nothing feels safe or sacred; even works in progress are now being uploaded and “finished” by AI.
AI “art” generators steal art in order to poorly replicate it—and if you don’t think the replications are bad, try counting the number of fingers on any AI-generated human figure)—all the while eliminating any financial benefit to the artists on whose work the entire ecosystem is built. Yet both for-profit companies and individual users don’t seem to care. Adobe now allows stock-art submissions from AI “art” generators, while multiple companies have begun using AI to generate and mint NFTs. Users of the various AI generators regularly pass off their generated images as “original” art and sell prints of their images, directly ripping off the artists whose aesthetics they claim to admire.
Whatever the original intent of creators of AI generators may have been, they’ve become little more than a way for the greedy to make a quick buck–or, in book publishing, a way for publishers to save a few dollars. After all, when a publisher chooses to use AI-generated images, there’s no human artist for them to pay and AI-generated stock images that can be generated in seconds are likely cheaper than those that take artists hours and hours of work to create.
No matter which publisher first dipped their toes into the use of AI-generated images, readers might have found the act disgusting, but coming from Tor, the disgust was doubled. Tor is a publishing house known for working with artists to create stunning, memorable book covers, for valuing such artists’ contributions and for profiting off of the beautiful work they create. Within the sci-fi and fantasy spaces especially, Tor is the publisher that sets the standard.
Yet in response to readers’ outrage, Tor shrugged off responsibility for the AI-generated cover image. They claimed that they didn’t know the image was AI generated when they chose it from a “reputable” stock-image website, even though image’s odd glitches (a giveaway of AI generation) are obvious at a glance.
In publishing, cover designs change constantly. If Tor had opted to redesign the Paolini cover, it wouldn’t have been the first time a company made a change after revealing a cover to the public–and it would have been for an understandable, artist-focused reason.
Tor, though, didn’t care. They moved ahead with the cover.
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"logging on and seeing my own art reposted to pinterest and my own art posted to an AI art generator and my dnd ocs reposted and edited/used without my permission and my dress designs being sold as a microtransaction in an app and then seeing 20 tweets about how artists are greedy" - @pixelllls on Twitter, in a now-deleted Tweet
I’ve always been fascinated by publishing’s relationship with art and artists. If you asked publishing industry professionals, from authors to sales departments to the president of Macmillan, they would tell you that they value artists, that publishing can’t do its work without them!
A good cover can make or break a book–yet rather than invest in artists, publishers seem increasingly focused on quick stock-image-generated covers or graphics they can build in Canva. This has become a trend so apparent in the adult romance genre that it’s a talking point on bookish subreddits and in Tumblr posts.)
The illustrators of graphic novels and picture books also don’t make as much money as you would think. Advances and royalties for these books are often split 50/50 or, optimistically, 60/40.
The casual devaluation of the work of visual artists in publishing goes all the way down the chain, as authors regularly praise their cover artists and illustrators but post “moodboards” for books and characters full of uncredited, stolen images.
Andrea C. White, one of my favorite fan artists, has been collecting responses of AI fans to artists over on her Tumblr. All of the AI users universally dismiss the work of artists, though the AI users could not make their “art” without the labor of the artists.
Publishers would never be openly dismissive of the work of artists in the same way that the users of AI generators are. But within publishing, the work of artists is minimized and exploited in many passive ways. This minimization isn’t always intentional, either. For instance, any time I point out the irony in authors using stolen images for moodboards even as they complain about other people posting uncredited quotations from their books, they pivot and start crediting the people who inspire them.
But publishing operates within capitalism, and the siren song of profit is louder for corporations than the ethics of supporting the artists who form the backbone of its industry.
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"Is it just me, or has the past two years been insane for the art community? We went from "each piece of art is unique, and a commodity" with NFTs, to "art is worthless, everyone copies anyways" with these AI images." - @MickJundt on Twitter
And now for some mildly good news: The U.S. Copyright Office initiated a proceeding to revoke the copyright of a comic book which was created using AI under the rules that "copyrightable works require human authorship,” according to AI Business. Multiple lawsuits are also in the works. Getty Images is suing Stability AI for scraping its copyrighted content, and a class-action lawsuit has been filed against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt.
There’s a hypothetical universe where these developments might affect the cover of Fractal Noise. If the Copyright Office rules that AI-generated art can’t be copywritten and the ruling is extended so that it applies in some way to Paolini’s cover, there would be nothing to stop anyone from, say, creating a book with a similar title and author name, using the exact same AI-generated image on its cover, and throwing their book up for sale on the same day that Fractal Noise is published. Tor would be unable to sue for copyright infringement.
But even this potential scenario won’t stop publishers from shrugging off responsibility and moving forward with more AI-generated images on book covers. They’ve proved this through the adaptation of AI-generated audiobooks, a different yet equally terrible can of worms that undermines the important work of voice actors. After all, publishers using AI-generated narrators get to save a buck.
Even if AI image generators are somehow only the latest fad in a series of flash-in-the-pan technologies that rob artists, embracing it will still undermine the industry in the long term.
Publishing needs to take the same stance as the Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro: "I consume and love art made by humans. I am completely moved by that. And I am not interested in illustrations made by machines and the extrapolation of information."
We shouldn’t abandon the creators who make books special. We should uplift and celebrate them, and we should firmly dismiss any universe in which they get replaced by algorithms built on their stolen work.
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To end, a small note about activism and advocating for artists.
If you are reading this, and you work in publishing: You have power! Push back against the attempts of your publishing company to use AI-generated images. Point to the negative reaction against the Paolini cover and the long-term effects such actions can have in destroying a publisher’s reputation and its relationship with readers. Politely point out that, hey, we don’t accidentally want to get involved in a lawsuit, do we?
If you are reading this, and you are an author: You have power! Explicitly state that you don’t want AI-generated images used in conjunction with your work. Publicly celebrate the illustrators and artists who work with you and who inspire you. Make sure there is not a universe where the next creator to be replaced by AI-generated “art” is you.
If you are reading this, and you are a reader: You have power! As news of more AI-generated art used on and in books comes out, tell publishers (politely) how disappointed you are that they’re abandoning original artists in favor of soulless algorithms. Don’t buy those books. Your voice is the one that matters most to publishers–because your wallet is the thing they are after.
And maybe, no matter who you are, don’t use AI image generators. Stealing from artists is just not cool.
Nicole Brinkley has short hair and loves dragons. The rest changes without notice. Her opinions are her own. Follow her on Instagram at @nebrinkley.
This essay was edited by Stephanie Appell. Read more of Stephanie's work at bookpage.com, where she is the children's and YA editor, or say hi on Twitter @noseinabookgirl. Her opinions are also her own.