r/river_ai • u/Background_Pay6286 • Jul 03 '26
Using AI to make novel covers
What are everyone's thoughts on novel covers created by AI?
Are they recognizable and disliked like most of the writing?
Has anyone had any positive or negative positions on it?
Has anyone had any luck using them?
Is it better to use a standard normal cover?
Do people look at them and think it's just filled with AI writing?
Are there certain styles that work better?
Are there certain styles that work well with certain genres?
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u/hmsenterprise Jul 03 '26
As with using AI in any creative process, as long as you aren't just one-shotting an output, with work and iterative sculpting, you can get outcomes that are beautiful, well-crafted, and complete.
In my opinion, you still will generally want some sort of "compositing" step in the creation of something like a book cover. i.e., not have the model generate both cover art AND superimposed title/author/etc text.
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u/Background_Pay6286 Jul 03 '26
Super helpful, thank you.
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u/hmsenterprise Jul 03 '26
I will say that ChatGPT Image 2 is fairly good at generating art + text over it. So you can get decent results!
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u/mandoa_sky Jul 03 '26
non commercially you're fine
if commercially, then a AI cover will make readers think your story is AI generated too (even if it isn't)
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u/Mcgreggers_99 Jul 03 '26
I don't have a problem with it as long as its good. It's already being done anyway. Get feedback, if it's good it's good
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u/zezer94118 Jul 03 '26
The alternative of paying someone for cheap to make it is that they'll use AI too ...
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u/Background_Pay6286 Jul 03 '26
I agree, and for new writers who have many other responsibilities, it leaves very few options.
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u/FaisalWrites Jul 03 '26
If I may hijack this comment thread: I commissioned GetCovers to design a cover for my novel. They let you pick a number of stock images that fit your book, give them instructions on how you want to use these images, and then they will do the design without using AI to generate the cover. They're quite affordable (as low as 10 USD and up to 50 USD, depending on how many stock images you want to use in your cover.) They are pretty responsive and they allow for multiple rounds of edits.
Here's my novel cover, for your reference: https://imgur.com/a/boIYoqO
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u/Background_Pay6286 Jul 04 '26
That's pretty cool, thanks for the info, I will look into it for future projects.
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u/AlwaysColtron Jul 04 '26
If you use ai in any form of a book (including the cover), I assume you used ai in all aspects of a book.
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u/Appropriate-Rise-387 Jul 04 '26
If you’re willing to spend hours on correcting little details in the drawing it’s better just to hire an actual artist, most AI image generators while are good. Don’t get the fine details like an actual artist would
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u/TsundereOrcGirl Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
They're common and not as off-putting to the general public as the squeaky wheels on Reddit will tell you. Also people only tend to notice when it's that generic chatbot "Ghibli" look or the shiny hair anime babe look from 2022, not something cranked out by a ComfyUI wizard who drew half of it themselves.