Good video. I have never understood the argument that goes, "If you're an author who uses an AI-generated cover, then your entire book must be written by AI." By that logic, if I hire an artist to create my book cover from scratch, then I must have hired a ghostwriter to write my entire book.

Great video!

Just to piggyback on the photography comparison. I remember when digital photography was coming onto the scene, a lot of "real photographers" dismissed it as not real photography because you could see the result immediately and if it wasn't good you could just fiddle with the settings and take another photo, which some claimed took the "art" out of photography because you didn't have to get the exposure right without seeing the result, or know all of the techniques to get a proper exposure with film, also the quality of digital photography at first was so much worse than film, like 1MP, so it wasn't a viable alternative for professionals and was kind of seen as a gimmick. Then digital photography quality got really good (on par or better than film cameras), camera makers started making professional level digital cameras, with digital sensors that could outperform film in low light conditions, offered much more flexibility with RAW files that could be manipulated drastically allowing photos that were severely over or under exposed to be adjusted to a perfectly exposed image. Today, nobody questions if a photographer who shoots with a digital camera is a "real photographer". But, the cycle continues, now there are AI tools that will edit your photos, cull through thousands of wedding photography images and select only the best ones, crop images, straighten them...etc. and there are photographers that say if you use these tools, you're not a real photographer. I feel that's the cycle of all disrupting technology especially in artistic fields, Dismissal (It's not as good as the old way), Push Back (It's as good, but you aren't a real artist if you use it), Adoption (Everybody uses it). With AI writing I feel like we are in between the Dismissal and Push Back phase, the tools aren't as good as a human (yet) but it's getting harder to dismiss it as a gimmick.

Very interesting video. I'm glad KZbin recommended it to me. I will say, I personally do not think that legislating AI safety will put us behind China. There are a lot of other things that limit China. Specifically access to hardware technology and government corruption. The government corruption and control of information in China is their great wall that they're going to have to deal with... either they have to remove information limitations, or their AI will always suck. America's great wall is that we have basically already trained AI on the entire internet. There is no more data available to train them, so new tech is our only way forward. Thanks for the clarifications on copyright and IP law. And for making this video.

What?

The work week used to be 80 hours a week and Henry Ford changed it to 40 hours a week. There is no reason that it can't drop to 20 hours a week and companies have to pay an AI or robot tax for each job that is replaced by AI. If companies want to off shore to escape the AI tax then just impose tariffs on incoming goods. Goods should also get cheaper as companies compete against each other.

Unfortunately, we'll always have the Billy Couls of the world (Willy's Chocolate Experience guy) who will abuse AI, but that comes with every technological advancement. Most people, I believe, will use AI as intended.

AI wont replace anything because it has no emotion. AI content is already making people crave authentic content.

A person on Facebook said AI is not intelligent. It is an amplifier.

From a strategic point of view, I have been engrossed in Written Word Media's 2024 Indie Author Survey Results. Since I am a new author and I am using AI to learn how to write (that is specifically how my prompts are set up), the key metric I looked at for indie authors was the number of books (I am assuming quality full length novels) it takes to become sufficient as an author, which is between 40 and 50 books. Since it takes me about 4 months in total to write about 100k word novel, that is 3 per year, perhaps when I get better 4. At an absolutely minimum that would be 10 years of work even with AI helping. For me that works out fine because I have no dire need to have writing support me, but I might 10 years from now. One thing I figured out early on is that marketing into the best community for your particular genre is crazy important. No marketing = zero sales, full stop. I publish wide across the world from a central aggregator. Marketing dollars spread across the world is mostly about making sure you are in front of eyeballs routinely. If I take that same money and place it into a single store in one particular community in one particular Asian country, I will get the same number of sales from that one store as from the whole rest of the world.

Funny you mention how all of this is subjective, everything you were saying you didn’t like was everything I love reading in just about every book lol so the wildly dramatic outputs would have been perfect for me lol

Authors of ALL people have had the weakest anti ai arguments given the fact that its almost become industry standard advice to "take ideas and add your own twist". "Stealing" is outright recommended in most cases and most of the fiction market is flooded with retellings. Authors should be the last ones shaming ai and the first ones embracing it

Great stuff! Thanks for the insights. It was a pleasure to chat with you at Author Nation. Would love to see you present there next year.

I have a solution. The music industry has a pin number that can be embedded in wav files and various mediums to track licensed sales to cover royalties. Authors should be able to embed text with such pins. There would have to be changes in computer systems, but eventually, if text is cut and pasted, the pin goes with it. even if it's a character. You could store 50+ in a single string with hashing in the metadata.

Interesting, but I'm wondering if mermaids do really get old 🤔

Great subject to speak on. My personal feeling about this is that the human is still the storyteller. Storytelling is the true art form of people who call themselves writers, at least for novels. I am the storyteller and AI is the writer. It performs a technical task. While there are levels to writing that can elevate the writing itself to art, largely that is not what we see in most literature. We are looking for the story. Being a great writer will perhaps get you recognized for some award and might even sell a few books, but being a great storyteller can make your story, and perhaps you, immortal.

I love your optimism. I'm so sick of the anti AI vitrol.

This is one of your best ones

AI is letting me write my first draft in 10 days instead of 2 months. I don't like to give it any freedom on the story, but I give it tons of freedom on describing everything, and a little dialogue freedom. Mostly I write the equivalent of a screenplay, mostly dialogue, movement, and emotion directions, with few vivid prose, largely just trying to stay consistent to the character voice, and then let it expand and rewrite everything into an active version. It's amazing and efficient. I've said again and again, I believe that AI will democratize talent. We are moving to an idea an economy. Anyone can create just about anything. Right now, I'm creating a video game, based on a video game a hacker in my novel creates to teach the spiritual lesson. I've got no coding ability. No artistic ability. No understanding of 3D art. And yet, my little game is coming together. Ideas. Every day, I write down 10 ideas, whether its stories, games, movies, whatever it is, because that's where we're headed. An Idea Economy. Ideas and marketing, if you have those two things you'll be fine.

A.I. won't take all our jobs. It'll just take 97% of them. But whether that happens tomorrow or in the next century, is a different question.

If AI takes my job and no one is around to see it did it really take my job?

I've had a lot of anti-AI people say that AI is bad for the environment and leave waste and use up water. You're always really informed and balanced on your AI take. Can you address what you know about this? I've never heard you mention this "anti" reason before. Thanks.

Would You Please answer.. What is difference between human writing Novel and AI writing Novel, and How to make AI Novel Like a Human written Novel...

Is this also able to be used for a nonfiction or text book creation. I have a trove of ideas for my profession and can be marketed to self help. What is the best way to use Ai for getting my ideas into print as i am a two finger typer and my brain goes faster than I can type. 🙂

Can you let us know how/where repurposed public domain literature can be marketed?

I just ran this with o1 mini to create the plan off 3000 words sample text and tried rewriting with both the o1 preview and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. I think o1 did slightly better, but Sonnet was still pretty good. o1 ran 0.35 for 1000 words, Sonnet was 0.04.

I start with a discussion with Gemini and ask what are the most successful trends in cover designs for [genre]. I think let it read my book and it to suggest style and prompts. I can then take the prompts to several image generators and pick the best. I could also edit to combine elements I like.

AI generative arts is literally stealing from the human experience to profit corporation and business. Using AI will likely devalue actual writers work by over saturating the market. If you like or enjoy writing, take pleasure in the struggle that makes your art you. Stop using technology to make it for you.

Can you please do an update on this subject

Might help you get a cleaner samurai sword, if you called it a “katana” then the A.i. wouldn’t be trying to interpret two words, but a singular identifying word that would allow it to be consistent throughout.

Would you consider doing a top to bottom non fiction video? :)

do you have a tool stack for non fiction?

do you think autocrit works well with non fiction too? or would you recommend another tool?

Excellent video!

I would suggest considering going one step further and creating the figure and the background as separate images and putting them on separate layers in a graphics editing programme. In some of the covers you created I imagine other people might want the man bigger or the lighthouse to stand out more for example and you could position and adjust the images individually. It does mean more work but it really gives you a lot more control over the final image without having to re-prompt and how it comes out just right.

Great clip as always. You should maybe pay someone to go through your comments and leave little love emojis for nice comments, as your fans want to hear from you more. :) I know you are busy, but a VA to do this would be cheap, and your fans would appreciate it - keep it up. (Not expecting a love emoji).

I've put more than a few hours into this. Like some women hate their bodies, I hate my writing. *smile* If I could just get myself to agree on what my best writing looks like, I'd be set!

What about the spine and back cover?

hi

Just found you and subscribed! I love your videos.

In the very first try I got a cover that I instantly fell in love with. And this morning I'm editing my character's descriptions to match the cover. Thank you very much for this suggestion.

I can see me using this to make a my book cover thumbnails.

Great walk through, @TheNerdyNovelist, thank you for this video! As for the text / image problems, there are plenty of tools (many free) that will remove backgrounds for you, which could equate to being able to break up your cover(s) of choice into their individual components and allowing for reuse later. This is especially good for anyone who is writing series and who wants to maintain the same font throughout the series. If you use the Plus plan you can create custom palettes (maybe you can manually on the others, IDK?). Keep in mind that the Plus is only $20 for a month / 1000 credits (up to 4000 images) and can be turned off when not wanted. FYI, PhotoPea is a free Photoshop alternative that was created to replace Adobe.

I may never write a great book (not for lack of practice) but at least now I can have a great cover to judge it by!

When I have bought covers, I always want the cover without words, because that always give me the freedom to do the text how I want, and sometimes I change my mind after the sale. So it's the same for me when I create my own. I also like being able to use my image however I want without buying other packages.

I’ve used Ideogram a bunch, it’s surprisingly great at text. But it isn’t great at retaining the font over new covers, say for a series. It *is* good if you use the series title as the “big” title text on the cover and the individual title as smaller text - and some authors do this for popular series so it’s not unprecedented.

Yeah, I prefer to design my own text when I design my own book cover prototypes.

Ideogram is fantastic for text. I've also done the opposite where I generate text in black and white as an asset. Overall I like generating assets that get assembled into the final piece. But even then, the original images you generated as full covers make for a great target that you can deconstruct to figure out what those assets should be.

Was thinking of redoing my book cover it’s a steamy Christmas novella and I’m wondering if I should go with the new style of illustrated covers or redo it with the couple or just the guy on the cover

Thanks for sharing. I've been searching for an AI tool like this. Found it!