This is the first cover I came up with for my upcoming novel. It's the front and the back of course. You can see the blurb right there too. As far as "enticing readers", this may work or this may not.
I know from experience that a book's cover is crucial for its sales. A boring or unappealing cover can ruin a good book making its sales nonexistent. A good cover can go a long way.
In that spirit, my wife took it upon herself to help me with the cover design. She essentially loaded this cover into ChatGPT and asked, "Make this book cover more engaging". Below is her result:
The certainly grab the eye a lot more. I'd like something closer to the second one as well, but maybe looking more like human artwork and not so much like AI. But that's my personal preference. Would people be fine with AI book covers these days?
There are so many questions I'd like answers for before I officially publish this work. Below are a few:
Which cover is more engaging?
Is the book's blurb interesting?
Are you fine with AI covers or deeply against them?
Please answer these questions in the comment section.
Lately I've been working with AI. I've been told that it could completely take over and revolutionize the entire entertainment industry. Maybe that's true or maybe it's not, but either way we should all see just how this AI stuff operates if only so we can better understand what it does and what it's capable of doing. I've seen it used in some commercials and Youtube channels so I can already see some of its potential. But, after working with it for a bit, I can tell you that so far it's a ridiculous headache.
For those who've never done it: AI basically operates by something called a "prompt". You have to type out in as much important detail as possible exactly what you want to see and/or hear. You can even upload any photographs or drawings of your own as "visual aids" for the AI program to use. But, so far for me, typing anything into these prompts is like asking an idiot to move my couch. You tell him "...I just want you to move it from this corner to that corner..." Despite your very concise instructions, he's shoving your couch up the wall, through the wall, out the window, he's throwing the cushions at the cat... pretty much anything but those (what you thought were) very simple instructions to understand.
Do you remember that movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Remember how upset the director Raoul J Raoul got when Roger saw tweeting birds instead of stars? Imagine how upset he'd be watching the following AI messes I made.
I'll show you the visual aids I drew up that I hoped would help the AI program understand exactly what I wanted:
The set up was simple. Vladimir Putin is standing there. My boy Avery walks in with a mallet and konks him on the head with it. Putin then staggers around in a daze with a bump on his head and Avery exits the scene laughing. I thought that was easy enough for the program to understand. However, below are several examples of the program delivering what IT thought I wanted. The results speak for themselves.
AI is straight up cuckoo-bananas! Why would it think I would want any of that?
Well, hey, this all brings to mind the commentary Brad Bird did for The Incredibles DVD. He basically said that working with CGI in the late '90's and early 2000's was frustrating because the computers wanted to do the exact opposite of what he was trying to do. He was trying to make the look and movement seem as organic as possible but the computer programs of Maya(or SoftImage or whatever program used) kept making things patterned and mechanical. He made it through that struggle. Hopefully I and any others working with AI will get through these similar struggles. Only time will tell.
I recently drew this picture of current leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin. It's a fine enough drawing as it is, even if I do say so myself. However, I didn't just stop there. I created a small animated video using this drawing as well. It is embedded below:
I don't know about you, but to me that looked painful. How much borscht is old Vlady eating exactly? YIKES! Why yes, the animation, such as it is, is indeed generated by AI. I'm told that this will be the technique that all animation will use going forward so I'd better get used to seeing how it works.
I think I'm starting to see how to get the hang of it. But, I will say, like about most of the artists out there, I still would much rather prefer making animation the absolute traditional way. Of course, the big difference there being that traditional animation requires a sizeable crew which must be paid whereas this technique here only requires a crew of me, myself and I AND can get results in a fraction of the time.
A bunch of years ago, I did a little drawing of then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a gerbil. That drawing is embedded below:
Neat. Anyway, just as in my most recent post here, I have been experimenting with AI. The result of that is a 3D and glossed out rendering of this same drawing.
So there we go. Then, also with AI, I used this drawing to make a small animated scene. It's a depiction of what Justin Trudeau did while in Canada's parliament for the past 10 years.
It's a "fun" little scene that only took me minutes to create, but on the whole I do prefer animating the traditional way. Even though it takes longer, I like having absolute control of what it looks like, how it moves, and planning the movements right down to the individual frame. That's how greats like Tex Avery and Chuck Jones worked and that's how I prefer to work too.
From my brief experience, working with AI is like getting an idiot to help move your couch. You just need this couch moved from one end of the room to the other and you think giving him that simple command will get the job done. But instead he starts shoving that couch out the door, through the wall, he tries to eat it at one point and all you can do is get increasingly flustered shouting "NO NOT THERE!! WATCH OUT FOR THAT........ LAMP!! ARE YOU STUPID?? WHY WOULD I WANT IT IN THE FISH TANK??!! WHERE DID THE CUSHIONS GO??!!" It can get so exhausting. Well, the traditional method can get exhausting too, but at least I'm in much more control.
Oh well, this looks like the future of animation and possibly movies and TV in general. So...... let's do what we can.
Anyone who's visited this here blog of mine for any length of time going all the way back to the 2000 "oughts" is most likely familiar with my Censor Monkey characters. They know their basic routine: a creator makes content then these ferociously disgusting (or disgustingly ferocious) monkeys swoop in to whine and complain about EVERYTHING!!! Or, as one Dee Snyder described Tipper Gore back in the 80's, "they go looking for something to be outraged about and find it".
One of those monkeys in the pantheon is the Black Panther Monkey, pictured below:
The bug up his ass is that everything is SOOOOOOOOOO RACIST!!! No matter what the project is, he'll find "racism" to rattle his nervous system one way or another. The delightful irony (at least delightful to me) is that the real life versions of these Censor Monkeys consider THIS monkey to be "racist" which only solidifies just how much like this monkey they are. The only way out of that "censor loop" is for them to pull that bug out of their asses and not find it "racist". Problem solved.
Well, at any rate, it's now the future. Art, animation, and entertainment in general might be taken over by AI. I'm not entirely a big fan of it either, but at the same time it's not going away anytime soon. It's a new tool that we'll have to learn to use one way or another. With that in mind, below is my very first attempt at rendering my Black Panther Monkey in an AI fashion. That rendering is embedded below:
I imagine the dialogue to be:
Monkey: "THIS WHOLE PRODUCTION IS RACIST! IT RACIALLY PROFILES ALL THE MARGERINIZED RACES! APOLOGIZE AND MAKE A MILLION CHANGES OR I'M SHUTTING YOU DOWN!!!"
Director: "It's just a pudding commercial.
Monkey: "CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE OR MY AK-47 WILL DO THE TALKING!!!"
Anyway, yeah there's still alot of work to be done. Like I said at the top, this is my very first delve into this emerging AI technology. We'll all see where this leads together.
