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A few weeks ago, I went through AI training at work. While I knew most of what was being discussed already, it got me thinking of how AI is going to change things.
Today, I use Grammarly to help clean things up before they go to the editor, and I don't see that changing. I don't use the AI features Grammarly offers because, well, it's no longer my work. I will continue to write things out the way I do today, but will others be tempted to go down the road of AI assistance? It does make things easier, though it runs the risk of plagiarism. If you don't have the imagination to write a story/book, then you really aren't an author.
That leads me to the formula-based books that I've read in the past, and I hate them. They are all the same. A happens, followed by B and C. Boring. It's really not different from using AI to assist, in my opinion. I know some of the top-selling authors use the formula, but it doesn't make me like their work. Whatever works for you, I guess. Oh wait, I used the formula with The Road to Saratin. The difference, I didn't use it again. Being a pantser, it didn't work for me. For those who don't know, a pantser is an author who doesn't have a plan, an outline, or anything when they start writing. I admit, not everything works out this way, but it always gets the creativity juices flowing.
Something that stuck with me the most from the AI training was AI-generated art. I became addicted to the AI Face Generator site. It's so fun. You type in a description, and it spits out some pictures. Amazing. By no means is it perfect. Sometimes I get people with eight fingers on one hand, three noses, no necks, feet coming out of weird places.
I don't want to tell you how many images I've done. It's a crazy amount. I created characters from my books, described them in the prompt, and then images of them appeared. Not all were good; some didn't even make sense.
The question on my mind is, who owns the rights to those countless images? Are they mine? Do they belong to Disney (that's one of the style options) or the creator of the generator? Can I use them in my cover art without someone screaming that I'm using their images without permission? From what I learned, no one really knows for sure.
I noticed that Amazon now asks when publishing a book if the cover or text was generated by AI. Amazon is trying to cover itself just in case someone else claims they own whatever it is.
It's best not to use AI to write or create cover art, especially when it could result in a mess, until we have more information. But that doesn't mean I will stop creating images for fun. You can find a fine selection of things that I came up with on my AI-Generated Art page.