AI Position Statement

Here's the summary version: there is not, and will never be in future, any AI used in the creation or marketing of any Ruby Landers books. All words are my own (unless otherwise specifically credited) and all artwork or images on book covers, social media, websites, newsletters or other promotional material will be made by human creators (paid, gifted, or in the public domain.)

For the rest of my take, please read on.

AI art is theft, pure and simple.

This is a fact that I didn’t fully comprehend when I first entered the world of self-publishing and so I want to share my story here because I think it highlights a few key points that I still hear debated within both the author and reader communities.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use a real cover artist to create my books, that was never a question. Your book cover is your greatest marketing tool; it’s not a place to cut corners. It’s also one of the biggest joys of entering the world of self-publishing: meeting all the other creators in your genre who are bypassing the traditional gatekeepers and sharing their work with the world. Everyone here is a bad-ass and I adore that. Creators need to support creators; we’re each other’s peers and community.

I found my dream cover artist and was thrilled when she said yes to working with me. Unfortunately, like most good cover artists, there was a waitlist, and in this case it was months. This will be worth it, I promised myself. I swallowed hard and delayed the release of my first book by four months.

In the meantime, I had a prequel novella to publish: a small enticement to get readers to notice me and consider investing in a full-length novel. So I put it out for free. I had no idea if I’d make back a single dollar of the significant money I’d already spent in the creation of my books, so I couldn’t justify spending more money on a cover for a freebie. I’d simply DIY this one. I’d also DIY an in-the-meantime cover for my debut while I waited so I wasn’t stuck with nothing to promo.

What sucks is that I didn’t even second-guess using AI. I assumed - as I see many others still doing - that AI art was simply art made by machines. Not ideal, I told myself, I’ll pay for a real cover down the track when I can. I wasn’t putting anyone out of a job; I’m a single parent on a nursing salary; sometimes you can only do the best you can do.

This is all to say that these are bananas excuses.

Firstly, AI art isn’t “computer generated.” AI creates art by taking real art - art made by human creators - and mashing it together to fit your prompts. It is directly stolen from the real artists who’ve spent hours or lifetimes painstakingly creating it; they’re not consulted or credited; they don’t profit from it; and by the proliferation of AI “art” they’re losing future opportunities to earn a living from their work.

Secondly, if in five or ten years time I can’t make a living because AI has taken my writing - without my consent - and blended it into a chunky word soup that’s somewhat palatable for you to purchase, I have no one to blame but myself for participating in the consumption of AI art in the first place.

So now let’s take the experience itself of creating the cover for my novella, Two Tickets.

Y’all, AI is a hellscape. I had a simple vision in mind: two women in the desert, one blonde, one brunette, both gazing off into distance. No matter my prompts or how I tailored the wording, AI spat back at me extremely thin, scantily clad, highly sexualised images of women. Because AI isn’t neutral, it’s fed by algorithms, and algorithms aren’t benign and they don’t come out of nowhere.

I found myself hurling frustrated words into the prompts box, WOMEN DRESSED, IN CLOTHES, TSHIRT ON, CASUAL CLOTHES, DRESSED and still AI would spit out a picture of a woman with her entire naked arse visible through a transparent skirt. I won’t even outline my attempts to tell the bots to create a human woman that didn’t have the proportions of a catwalk model, because that wasn’t the character I’d written. The bots simply wouldn’t do it.

Now think about who else is missing from the algorithm, what other horrifying views it might be fed, of what women are for, what gender looks like, what stereotypes around non-whiteness exist, if queerness is visible, what disability is, what fatness looks like. Having briefly dabbled, the vision of humanity AI art conjured up terrified me.

Here’s the cover I eventually came up with:

God, the cringe I cringe now when I look at it. And just to humiliate myself further as punishment, here’s the AI placeholder cover I made for my debut novel, terrible fonts and dubious colour choices and all:

These have been fairly well scrubbed from the internet now, for good reason. They’re ugly, and they’re made from stolen art. They embarrass me, and if you’re an author skating by on AI covers yours should embarrass you too.

Now let’s talk about the experience of working with a real cover artist.

My covers are made by the Australian designer Cath Grace, and you can see other examples of her work here.

The process of working with a real human meant sharing my writing (scary!) so she could read it, giving her a brief of what kind of style I envisioned or hopes I had for the cover, and then waiting to see what she’d come up with.

The cover of Falls From Grace could never have come from stolen-art-soup. AI can’t read your book and have an emotional response to the love story. It can’t daydream. It can’t filter colours and symbolism through a lifetime of experiences in the world, or capture the exact feeling of longing, between two women in a snowy forest. A human artist can though, and so that’s the piece of art that made my words into a real book. It hangs on my wall now too.

And here, by the way, is the recent cover redesign of Two Tickets, that I could now afford since Falls From Grace was a success because the cover makes you want to read it in the first place! This is what the cover looks like now it's made by a creator who understands colour palettes and fonts and women’s actual bodies and who can create a piece of art that makes you feel something. Because AI “art” can’t do that, only real art can.

If you’re someone who loves books, please check to see if there’s a real artist credited for the cover of the story you’re considering picking up. Reach out to the author and check in if there’s not a credit. Be aware of what it is you’re consuming. And if you’re an author, don’t be like me. Think harder. Do better.