To use or not to use AI in your Book Cover?

Picture this: You’re a self-published author, diving into the world of generative AI to create your book cover. Excited by the possibilities, you fire up Midjourney, ready to see your vision come to life. But as you scroll through the AI-generated book cover designs, you can’t help but notice a recurring theme – the hands are always a bit… off. Welcome to the world of generative design. Where people step into the pond in hopes of saving time and money and can leave muddier than expected from murky legal ground to copycat images.

Unique vs templated book cover

When it comes to capturing the essence of your book and connecting with your readers, nothing beats the personalized touch of a custom-designed cover. It is what showcases your work as being uniquely yours, after all. You want to make sure you love your book cover as you’ll be looking at it very often. To explain the near absurdity of templatizing what’s supposed to showcase your work as unique, I like to use brand design as a comparative example.

We all know why using a pastel, circle, water-coloured background with a metallic font logo is bad right? It looks like everyone else’s logo (from 10 years ago) and there’s nothing unique about it. Your brand isn’t just supposed to look nice. It’s supposed to set you apart, capture a brand’s essence, and communicate something about you to your audience. It should signal to your audience ‘hey this is me’ and be recognizable in a crowded space. (Psst. if you’re in need of a bold brand designer – check out my biz friend Rachel who I recommend to my clients). Book cover design isn’t much different than branding when it comes to the importance of being unique, and staying true to your book’s essence. Surely, it comes with an investment but it’s worth it if you want your book to sell (read more on book cover design pricing).

Is an AI-generated book cover ethical and legal?

Using generative AI images on your book cover also presents challenges beyond aesthetics. The technology as it stands today hinges on the fact that it scrapes, scans and absorbs online content and borrows (to put it mildly) styles, elements, and potentially entire works from other artists to create something for you that is not only derived from something else versus inspired by, it’s also appropriating without credit.

Use without credit is a huge no in any creative space. Unfortunately, the way innovation works is that the technology solves a need (saves time, and money) but doesn’t always address ethics. The legal structures then catch up to the tech, normalizing standards, disclosure and paving the way for embracing advancement while maintaining integrity. 

For example in the writing space, teachers, publishers and more are armed with plagiarism detection tools and AI vs human detection software to analyze text. As it stands, there is no way to trace back the original artists’ work and give individual credit so there is no way to attribute this ethically. AI can scan big data very fast. If we thought of how much information was used to create a single image it’s likely the artist credit attributions would be pages long. 

This begs the question, is it enough to simply disclose an image or work is AI generated? Amazon KDP seems to think so. Amazon now requires any AI work to be disclosed to be able to sell on the platform. Similar to how a non-custom font would have to be disclosed in a trademark process for a logo. It’s letting folks know that legally this isn’t entirely a unique work the individual created.

So while generative AI offers convenience and templates to work from it may not fully grasp the subtle nuances that make your book unique. Which arguably is one of the points of a book cover design. Working with a designer allows for a unique style, and approach, and makes it easy to understand ownership. Something that will increasingly matter in the years to come. I don’t use AI-generated images in my design business.

Disclaimer: I use some of the AI features in Adobe software in my work to speed up my process and eliminate hours of manual edits but I would not use AI to generate the full artwork instead of me.

Any thoughts on using AI for your book cover design? Share it in the comments!