We Can Write It For You Wholesale

Let’s talk about AI and the arts.

No. Come out from under the table, you cowards. Seriously. This must be talked about. And not in the “REEEEE someone is stealing mah immortal art” sense. Nor in the “soon, it will all be soulless echos.” We’re adults. Sit your arses down and talk like adults.

Do try not to start any firefights in the comments, and keep the fistfights to a minimum. When you’re done, mop the blood from the floor. Fluffy has the first aid kit.

As you know, I think, I used MidJourneybot as the basis of my new covers. And then I did a whole lot of work to finish them. I think this gives me a unique perspective on the whole “AI art” thing. And the fact that I started life and writing life as ASL gives me another unique perspective on “The AI is gonna write all our novels. Editing will be outsourced to third worlders.” A charming point of view posited in this article which was obviously written by someone outside the industry, and which is well-thought-out, carefully argued. And profoundly wrong. And by outside the industry I mean either, writing or programing.

First what is AI, as we now know it: I got this neat explanation, though I kind of already knew what it was: It is a program that can reprogram itself on the fly by getting input from users.

It is in no way sentient, self-conscious, or as complex (this is important) as the most idiotic of moron cats. Havey, if focused on art and able to take instruction could beat it with all his paws tied behind his back.

Now that we’ve established that, let’s talk about the “morality” of the AI art robots. Note I use MidJourneybot, because it’s not just taking pictures and modifying them, which lends itself — in the hands of unscrupulous users (though note, it’s still the users) — to sailing mighty close to plagiarism.

As for using “posted art to learn” without explicit permission, I think the people worried about it have a completely inflated idea of what AI can do. No, seriously. I’ve wrestled the idiotic thing through six covers, and have more banked, in case it shats itself when I next try it. I can type in “Mona Lisa in the style of Boris Valejo” and get fifty attempts, three of whom aren’t even human, and half of which are men. (And no, we’re not at home to your conspiracy theories.)

And if I wanted Mona Lisa talking to the Thinker in front of a spaceship, in the style of Boris Vallejo…. Well, prepare to see horrors that can’t be unseen. And I don’t just mean hands everywhere. (What’s with MJB and hands, anyway) I mean the thinker with something that looks like Mona Lisa as a cat growing out of his thigh. (And before you ask, yes, I’m using the latest version and the enhanced rendering which costs more. Because I use it for covers.)

To make those covers, it took entire days of shouting (okay, typing, but I was shouting too, trust me) commands at it, plus then merging four renders per cover, sometimes to get a figure “stitched” together. It gets “weird ideas” in its head and won’t let go. Like for reasons known only to its bits and bites, for a while the figure I was trying to render for Luce, despite command of “Blond Male” rendered only as a black female. Then when it got the point, it rendered him ONLY as an anime character. As a joke I actually did an anime cover, for my fans, but it was completely unsuited for the book, of course. Let me see if I have it. Oh, yeah. Hold on:

That joke cover took me…. an afternoon, simple though it is. The real one took a little longer. I did the joke one simply because I was sick and couldn’t think in words.

A friend, who is an artist, got stung while I was going through this, and said “Why don’t you just pay an artist?”

Ah. Good question. The answer it threefold:

I’d love to hire some of Baen’s artists. Say the one who did Darkship Thieves, or the one who did Darkship Revenge (Steve Hickman.) But the truth is I can’t afford them. Certainly not for RE-issues.

Honestly, even for new books, until I get my profile up a little more by a lot of new stuff. I do probably make around 5k per reissue per year. But do note the per year. Upfront, I spend about $600 per book, which must comprise all the editing, etc, and which eats the first month’s profits.

So, I can’t afford a professional artist. The scrambling lot of “trying to break in” don’t want to do book covers. Or if they did, they don’t want to take direction on those book covers. And if you get someone from Eastern Europe or Asia, you risk copyright infringement, because they don’t care, and you don’t know everything. I’ve tried “give starting artist a chance” but none of them worked, and they cost me money.

I can afford something like Jack Wylder or Cedar Sanderson. Jack is doing my covers for the Daring Finds Mysteries, and has done new covers for Shifters, that I need to upload. I pay him about what I can afford. But he’s not right for ALL of my covers (he has a style.)

They do covers as I do covers: Piece together and overpaint, either photos from stock sites, or renders, or midjourneybot.

So, I’ve been doing my covers for a long time, mostly DAZ. But here’s the thing: I can use Midjourney bot because I DO have art training. I’m rusty as all get out. I haven’t had time or mental space for art for about six years, during which time I often didn’t have time or mental space for writing either, but did anyway. BUT I took five years of art classes.

There is nothing in those covers for the Darkship series that I couldn’t have done, myself. It just would have taken me about a month to do each. And that would mean no time for writing. What MJB does is give me the very basic, complete mess, raw materials to create the art from in a day or at worst a week. (The week usually working in the evening, after a day of writing.) Which is why I only really started doing these covers when I got a drawing screen-tablet. Before that…. it was bad. I don’t draw well with a mouse, let’s say that.

But again, note, the limitations: the bot does a person at a time, and if you really want it to work, for all you hold dear, do the background separately. It takes a lot of iterations to get something you say “I can work with that.” AND then you have to break the things apart and re-stitch them together. And that’s if you don’t get a weird run of what the bot thinks you want. Like for a while all my guys looked like Alfred P.

Other things: even the best renders will have “signatures” or weird symbols in strange places. I laughed myself sick at the artist who “knew” it was plagiarizing him because the picture someone had shown him had a signature on the neck. (“signature” it’s mostly random scribbles.) This came through while I was erasing a “signature” from a character’s forehead. Anyway, the guy was sure because only HE signs pictures on the neck. Oh, sweet Summer Child, in eternal bloom.

And it really doesn’t do well at any type of complexity. At all. You often get confused light sources, for instance. Or– Never mind.

So, that linked article. The bots are coming for us! Writers. Novelists. We’re going to be obsolete. All that genre trash is going to be written by bots, and edited by Pakistanis and Chinese at minimum wage! Just wait.

Yes, I’m laughing myself sick again.

I’m not saying someday the bots won’t be able to write coherent novels. I kind of doubt it, but it’s entirely possible. I’d think comic books would come first, and yeah, I have a reason for that. It’s a matter of complexity.

Right now, the AI writing bots can write buzzfeed articles. Well, okay, so can elementary school kids given clear directions.

More than that, if you don’t realize it, I’ve known for years that bots can write what I call “scraped from online” non fiction books. I once bought one by accident. I was doing research on Robin Hood. Which means, first I went all over the net. Then I bought books.

This book was clearly all the info from various websites, scrambled to avoid “plagiarism” and some of the sentences, therefore, made no sense WHATSOEVER. Because scrambled.

But each chapter was super-simplistic, and just stated the information. I’ve had emails from places trying to sell me those bots.

These books show up on Amazon (you can put up a book a day with them) and get horrible reviews, get taken down and a new one shows up.

I’m not a hundred percent sure I didn’t buy a Jane Austen fanfic written by AI. It had that feel, both in that the sentences made sense, but nothing else did, and that it confused things no human being would. (Darcy’s sister is Miss Fitzwilliam, for instance. And she was seduced by Whickam at MARgate. And the sentences made individual sense, but you had to keep reading back and going “Wait, what?” because there was subtle not working together.)

Thing is, it’s limited. Right now bots can write simplistic articles. I’m not sure it could write one of my posts. (Yeah, why would it want to? Point.) And more importantly, I’m sure it can’t write a short story. It might be able to write flash fic, if you stand by to edit.

A novel is well beyond it. A novel might ALWAYS be beyond it.

“But Sarah, look how much better the AI art got! AI novels are the same thing.”

No. They’re really not. It’s more like “do a mural of the battle of Agincourt with detail and realism.”

“So it’s more complexity. They’ll get there tomorrow.”

It’s not that easy. Look, we know how to reattach fingers, say. Brain transplants might be impossible (yes, it’s great science fiction but…) because there’s that many more connections. Complexity.

And even AI is not as perfect as you’ll get the idea from say my covers. There was a lot of work. Including working on the eyes so one of the characters didn’t look palsied.

So, I think at a minimum the people who say “AIs will be writing novels next week” are crazy. Sure, there could be a sudden and massive breakthrough, but– I don’t see it.

I do see generating plots. In fact, my husband says there are already some pretty good ones. That’s different. Novels plots are patterns. You can generate patterns with bots fairly easily (And there’s enough analysis on line, it doesn’t need to be extracted from the novels themselves, which might be trickier.) The problem is writing them, after, because that’s never as linear as it seems.

The guys doing the article linked above seemed to be convinced it would be trivially easy to just write the novel from the outline. And they’re reassuring those writers that aren’t formulaic that their jobs are secure. Meaning, they think the dahlings will be secure and have nothing to fear (giggles.)

For the rest of us they foresee unemployment, as you know, the low-paid foreigners edit the bot output to make it as good as average genre writing, and we’re up a creek.

It doesn’t work the way they think. Let’s suppose by a miracle tomorrow the whole thing gets much much much better, to the level of midjourney bot, say.

That still requires a skilled novelist, just like seaming together the output of MJB requires at least a middling artist. (A good one would do way better than I do.)

And the idea that a foreign speaker can “smooth over” any oddities in the bot’s writing is probably the most giggleworthy of all. Why? Well, because let me tell you, as someone who started out ESL I had serious issues with sounding just “off” enough for an uncanny valley effect. And this was enough to put people off. Still is, when I’m ill or not functioning very well.

I was also highly amused by “They will hire” — apparently he thinks there’s a central publishing inc. that will do these things.

But let’s suppose that AI for novels gets that much better that it renders me obsolete?

What then?

Well — I don’t know. I know legislation and litigation to outlaw progress never works as intended, and when it “works” at all the results are horrific destruction.

Would I like to be replaced by AI? No. And I think it would take some doing, since I’m… very me.

But if it were to happen, I guess I retire. And hide in a corner, with my AI bot subscription, ordering and mainlining the Heinlein novels Heinlein never wrote.

I’ll be all right….