Navigating an increasingly artificial world

Writing sometimes feels like it's 90% reading. You read to keep current in your genre, you read outside your genre to experience different ways of telling stories, and then you read and re-read your own work in multiple rounds of editing.

Reading in-genre has been the hardest for me. I've already read all the big ones. All the Gibson and Stephenson, and all the newer entries like Napper as well. There just aren't that many cyberpunk books available which is why, when I share these links to the author swaps, I am often stretching a bit when it comes to the genres. But if the genres are a bit loose (although there are some new dystopian options out this week), there is a common theme in the books I tend to personally pick up; nice covers. It doesn't guarantee that I'll enjoy the book (but Immortal of the Saltless Sea was a great grab), but it does feel like it's a good proxy for how much effort the author put in. A low effort cover doesn't speak well for how much effort did they put into the writing, and I will assume that there has been even effort less put into the editing. An A.I. cover? Instant no.

I will get it out of the way right off the top; I am not anti-A.I. I use it at work all the time, and it's a great tool when applied to specific types of problems, but it does not make me something I am not. Doing some simple code in Claude does not make me an engineer any more than using Google Translate means I can speak Japanese. That dissonance is even greater when it comes to art. To create art is to create something new, and that's not what A.I. is capable of doing. It is, at best, creating something pleasing to the eye by relying on your sense of familiarity. The cyberpunk hacker you ask it to create is dressed in black with devices strapped to his arms (and it's almost certainly going to be a him), with plenty of tattoos, and definitely a set of goggles, because that's what the majority of images the A.I. was trained on contained. It will be genre appropriate, aesthetically pleasing and better than something I could draw myself, but it's not something new. It's a really well orchestrated Photoshop collage of art that already exists. If you use A.I. for your cover, you will always end up with something that looks like everything else in the genre, because that's exactly what it is. Something that is both nothing you have seen before, and everything you've ever seen at the same time.

I'd rather see a bad Photoshop collage as a cover. It at least shouts to the world 'I am a writer, not an artist, but I respect art.' Even better, hire an actual artist who can transform something as horrible as this:

Into something as amazing as this:

Thanks,

Dave