I Think AI Covers Have A Way To Go…

I read with interest a post on Medium by Stories Rule Press author Tracy Cooper-Posey, talking about the world’s first AI created magazine cover, by Cosmopolitan.

As a science fiction writer, I’m always interested in computer advances and AI is developing at the speed of sound, these days.  We already have AI Narrated audiobooks popping up into the mainstream (I’ll talk about that one day soon), and AI translated novels (also more on that soon, too).

Now…AI created book covers?  Could that be next?

I did a bit of digging into the AI that created the Cosmo cover.  It was originally called DALL-E Mini, but has since been renamed Craiyon.  (Clever name!).  The version that Cosmopolitan used was trained in the art of magazine coves before they let it loose on their own.

However, there is a public, free portal to access Craiyon right here on the web.

I was understandably curious and tried playing around with it for a while.  I thought I’d try my hand at a SF cover.

You have to hone in on your keywords to get just the right effect you want and Craiyon has an issue with human faces (which explains the faceplate on Cosmo’s cover).  But I ended up with a piece of artwork that had potential:

Unfortunately, the artwork is both small, and square.  But it has an interesting “mood” and I could easily see it on the cover of a military SF novel.

I rolled up my sleeves and with my (minimal) digital art skills, chopped and edited the original work into a mockup cover:

I don’t think the cover is going to win any awards!  The text is just awful.  But I also didn’t spend very long on this.  The artwork is a bit blurry because I blew it up to a workable size and resampled.  If I’d had a bigger image to play with, it would be crisper.

Still…it’s an intriguing start.

But I don’t think AI created book covers will be invading our bookshelves in the very near future.