As I’ve said before, I will never use AI for writing, but pretty much everything else is on the table. For me, the most interesting application is in image and video generation. My original cover for The Planet Baggers was designed purely by me in Pixelmator Pro on a Mac. That was before the AI hype had started. Early AI image generation was pretty awful anyway and I largely ignored it for a few years. It’s only when I started getting fooled by Instagram posts that weren’t real that I sat up and took more notice.
My preference would always be to rely on my own imagination in creating anything but when it comes to graphics, well I’m decent at image manipulation but but drawing and painting — I was away with the fairies the day they handed out that skill set. If I was rolling in it I’d hire the best artist I could find. I’m not, so I can’t. Which is where AI now comes in. If you can describe something well enough to an AI it can often make a fair old stab at creating the image you want. Sometimes it gets lucky (or I do depending on how you look at it) and comes up with an image that blows me away. Other times it misses the mark completely.
The key to getting the best out of AI images is to remember that it has learnt everything from the internet. If you ask for a beautiful woman it can do that with its AI’s closed because there are a gazillion images of beautiful women on the internet. But if you ask it for something it has never seen before then you are going to struggle. I’ll give you an example. I thought I would see if AI could generate some images of my characters in The Planet Baggers. I wrote a few sentences describing Colin and Kayleigh and pasted then into the AI. What it came back with blew my mind! Both characters looked real and almost identical to the images I had in my head. I say ‘almost’ because both characters were based on real people I know and AI refuses to base images on actual people. But AI’s characters were close enough — if they made a movie of PB and cast actors that looked like that I’d be more than happy about it.
What particularly struck me was the look of determined confidence on Kayleigh’s face and the bewilderment on Colin’s — neither of those traits had been in the description and the AI did not have access to the book manuscript. At the risk of giving AI far too much credit, I’m tempted to believe it gleaned enough about their personalities from my descriptions to realise Colin was someone who might be considered way out of Kayleigh’s league and gave him a suitable expression to suggest it. Or it could just be freakish luck.
Now here is an example of an epic fail. Well, perhaps not epic, but certainly a fail. AI’s attempt at Omigodians was dismal. In fact, it took several attempts and never got anywhere near how I imagine them to look. The one I chose was the best of a bad bunch, and even then I had to modify it myself. Omigodians are meant to have two noses. No matter how much I pleaded with AI and emphasised that fact it simply could not deliver two noses. Why? Because it has never seen a creature with two noses so it has no frame of reference. It is proof that despite all its intelligent reasoning and data processing, AI does not have imagination. I had to use my limited skills to add an extra pair of nostrils to the creatures — nothing like I see them in my head but better than nothing. Then there’s the fingers. Despite telling AI several times that Omigodians have seven fingers but no thumbs I could not get it to generate that. It’s the same thing — it has never seen a creature with seven fingers and no thumbs so it is beyond its capability to create that. It had a fair stab at the green hair but overall, these are not my Omigodians.
So where does that leave us? If you write romance novels or mystery adventures or pretty much any genre that involves human beings and animals exclusively, then AI could probably generate fabulous artwork for you, perhaps good enough to use as a book cover. If you write fantasy or scifi then you may be able to get some useable images if you can word your prompts well enough but once you try to get bizarre alien creatures into the mix you will most likely end up frustrated. I do believe it will continue to get better but I also think I will need to meet it half way by honing my prompt-writing.