The A.I. troll hunt
I’m of a certain generation. I was born before the internet and grew up without cell phones, streaming, or Grindr. But tech has always fascinated me. Widespread availability of personal computers revolutionized how I write. From high-school binders with punch-hole paper to contain my manuscripts and enough Whiteout to plaster oceans, I could transpose my work onto floppy disks, then hard drives, and so on to the marvels of today. As a writer, not having a computer to write is unthinkable to me, even if my once-legible handwriting has devolved into a doctor’s prescription scrawl.
Though I still mostly use my phone to call people (I’ve a few apps for modern convenience but often forget to use them) each new iteration in tech makes me curious. I’m not the grumpy man in a shoe muttering that in my day, we cruised in bars and didn’t scroll through curated dick pics. And the way I feel about A.I. reflects my curiosity. I’m fascinated and wary of it in equal measure. And with every technological development thrown our way, I’ve made the effort to study its potential impact and grown rather perplexed over the furor it’s creating in one particular arena, which happens to be my professional one: writing and publishing.
Authors must maintain social media these days to build a career and I’m no exception. I follow many. Lately, I’ve seen several authors post publicly that if there’s A.I. art on a book cover, it’s a no-go for them. Within minutes, they have others leaping onto the bandwagon, to the tune that if it’s an A.I. cover, the book must also be written by A.I. and other such nonsense that if you stop to think about it for a minute makes no sense. But since when has logic gone hand-in-hand with a militant stance? To demonize a foe is the tyrant’s handbook for dissuasion, intimidation, and yanking others to heel.
But the torches-and-dogs mentality seems more virulent in publishing. I’m the first to admit we’ve a lot to fear from the A.I. Frankenstein — mainly, if it ends up deployed as a military weapon. Experts warn it could potentially overwhelm us as a species by churning out endless paper clips or seeing us as the main culprit of life-threatening, human-generated calamities like climate change and zap us into goo to resolve the problem. (To be honest, drowning in paperclips or liquified into goo would be humanity’s just reward). That said, I’m also in a group of artists and authors using A.I. and their palpable trepidation of being called out and lambasted, ostracized and blacklisted for it harkens to fear under fascist terror tactics. Is this how we treat each other now over available tech?
Prompting “hot shirtless dude in cut-off denims” on an A.I. art generator site is very unlikely to devastate our planet or economy. We’ve done a bang-up job of that on our own. And though the swath that A.I. is cutting through artistic arenas is very troubling, as some artists find that with your average horny person prompting their own porn, that fine art print of the hot dude in cut-off denims isn’t selling anymore, the problem, as so often happens in mob mentality, is askew targeting. Authors, in particular indie ones, are bearing the brunt. Some readers and self-appointed author arbiters are targeting suspicious book covers as A.I. generated, followed by a troll flash-flood of: “If the cover is A.I., so is the content” and tanking the title with one-star reviews. How are they coming to the conclusion? By running covers through A.I. bot detectors, which, trust me, are hardly reliable. I’ve tested plenty with my own art.
Because I don’t believe in preaching without stepping up for the choir, let me use myself as an example. I employ A.I. as part of my artwork. Yes, I’m one of them. In addition to being queer, rebellious and stylish, I’ve been making art for as long as I’ve been writing. I started as a child with crayons, graduated to color pencils in adolescence, then to watercolors and finally oils in my young adulthood. I took art classes with the dream of being a painter. I sold a few paintings, too, but I wasn’t a Dali. I write better. I kept making art as a personal hobby. With Photoshop, I plunged ecstatically into teaching myself the limitless joy of compositing digital art.
Then A.I. appeared. Of course, I couldn’t resist it. I’m not a fearful person to eschew innovation. What I discovered was nascent tech that while rapidly evolving remains imprecise and glitchy. Some people dedicate endless time to mastering the A.I. prompt; you’d think as I traffic in words, I’d be one of them. Turns out, I don’t have it in me to be an expert prompter because I lack the patience to roll credits and adjectives interminably. I end up shouting at the bot for generating a wet cat in a cape when I asked for a cat-eyed man in a cloak. But I still managed to generate assets for my art that I simply couldn’t locate in stock. So I started using A.I. for impossible-to-find assets, like historically accurate attire that doesn’t resemble Halloween costumes at Target, which most historically-clad stock models look like. I generate each piece of an outfit — piece by piece, mind you, because generating all of it at once gives me malformed and melty. I then take each piece into Photoshop to refine, paint, and composite it. I’ve spent days fine-tuning A.I. generated assets to blend into a composite. I still buy plenty of stock, too. And I use my stock subscriptions far more.
Each of my composite artworks can include up to twenty or more assets, with less than 20% A.I. generated — and every single A.I. asset is vastly changed from the original burped by the bot. I prompt without resorting to names of artists or famous likenesses because I seek photorealistic images without overt styling. I never generate an entire artwork. Why? Because it wouldn’t be my vision. It would be a facsimile, and I love doing detail work myself. A.I. is another tool in my arsenal, like Photoshop and stock images. A tool, not a master.
But if I test my art compositions with an A.I. bot detector, I’ll receive a gamut of results that in no way reflect reality. One artwork I made years ago without A.I. but with DAZ assets (DAZ is a 3D rendering program favored by many indie designers) flagged my art as 60% likely to “be created by A.I.” To goose the detector, I threw together artwork with 80% A.I. assets and 20% stock. The detector flagged it as “likely to be created by a human.” Uh, okay. Let’s try again. Every time, the detector failed to accurately identify my composition. Now this doesn’t mean a fully A.I. generated piece of art can’t be flagged as such. It can — and often is. There are telltale signs. But because I composite my assets, always hand-adjusting, painting and filtering to hopefully create seamless integrity with stock photos, the bot detectors can’t detect the A.I. asset. Once I perform my painstaking magic on it, the asset becomes part of my art.
The argument that anti-A.I. people will often cite is “A.I. is the easy solution.” Not as far as my personal experience goes. It’s not easy at all to prompt what you want and obtain it at a first attempt. Or your twentieth. It almost always requires hours rewriting the prompt, if you’re lucky. Sure, you can rewrite and re-roll until A.I. delivers something gorgeous or download the convolution of A.I. software directly onto your system and train it yourself. Some people do it. I’m in awe of them. I don’t and never will. I have Photoshop and my brushes do my heavy lifting.
In addition, while I understand why others use it, I’ve never employed A.I. for my writing. Writing is a craft I prefer to continue to learn on my own, as I did my design skills. No matter how sophisticated a machine gets, it can’t capture what makes my voice unique. Barring the fact that A.I. assisted writing software can react like a hormonal teenager — overeager and clumsy — it serves no purpose for me. I’m accomplished enough as an author that I don’t need a machine to write for me, just as I don’t need it to create my art other than as a tool to conjure assets for my imagination. To use A.I. in my writing would steal the joy it brings me, my endless fussing over sentence revision and penchant for too many semi-colons.
But for my art, A.I. has been transformative. Assets impossible to purchase in stock are now available to me if I undertake the necessary post-work to refine them. I limit A.I. generation to limited assets. Other people use it to create an entire artwork, and bully for them. Not my thing. Some guys like boxers. I prefer briefs. It’s all about choice until it’s illegal.
Of course, we each have our right to stake a position in the tumultuous A.I. arena, but the fact that some authors use A.I. to create their book covers (selling A.I. art to others is a ball of nebulous yarn that requires another post I’m ill-equipped to write) is by no means the yardstick to measure a book’s content. In fact, it’s a damaging presumption leveled against hard-working indie writers in particular, yet another example of how internet culture loves to trash pile-up. A.I. written books are flooding the market and it concerns me as a working writer, but those books are at least for now identifiable for weird turns of phrase, repetitive descriptions, and a distinctly hollow tone. A.I. hasn’t yet managed to write War and Peace. It may well might, but I bet it’ll be even more ponderous than the original while lacking the human hubris.
I’ve always been a bigger picture guy. I worry over how the warp-speed development of A.I. will be deployed in defense, surveillance, industries that regulate food and water, medicine, etc. Going on a troll hunt for the author with a hot A.I. generated dude in cut-offs on their cover isn’t going to address the potentially catastrophic or beneficial challenges that A.I. poses. It might scratch the itch to raise a flag for human artists first and only, but it’s also a mindless attack that fails to address anything but the itch. It won’t resolve the prevalence of A.I. But it can turn authors against each other in an already precarious industry riven by competition. Bullying is a time-honored tactic to get competitors out of the way.
So, be kind. Be informed. Don’t rush to judgment and knee-jerk reaction or hurl boulders like a troll. Actions matter. You don’t want to use A.I. art on your book cover? You have that choice. Just don’t deny others theirs.
