Coming Clean on the AI Thing

I wanted to hate this thing. I wanted it to be ‘stupid’. I wanted it to be ‘dumb’. I wanted it to be altogether unhelpful.

I don’t always get what I want.

For the last two weeks I have thought about how I might “frame” this post, if I made it at all. I’m bound to incur the Wrath of the Internet…again. At least in some part for what I’m about to write and show you. If you don’t already know, this is a rather “hot button” issue among creative types, in fact it’s pretty much the only thing one author group on FB talked about, For or Against. The dream was flooded with people screaming at each other.

That’s never productive.

Some time around March this year my settlement money from Anthropic will come in. I want to put some away, probably actually put some into an IRA for myself but at this stage of the game, really is that any help? I don’t know. I do know that, for the first time ever, I will have in my hot little hands “Marketing Money”. If you don’t see the irony in that I can’t help you. You might want to leave now.

Wanting desperately to take this seriously because this probably my one and only truly good shot at that Stan Lee Moment I want so badly, I sat down with myself and my Cast & Crew. We read those posts in that group and we looked at the artwork. We looked at our own artwork.

Those are my most recent covers. I made each and every one of them. I hemmed and hawed over each and every one of them. I tried my utter best with each and every one of them. Those covers have gone through many incarnations over the years. I happen to really love at least one of them…ok two.

But it was time to let some things go so we could welcome some new things.

Looking at those overs from a strangers point of view there’s nothing that ties this series together but more than that there is nothing will stop the scroll. I have come to realize you must be able to do that before anything. I watched my husband and my daughter and then myself for a few days. Watched the behavior on the phones and it is one nearly endless motion of moving the screen. Stopping is a rarity.

I am guilty of that.

You are too.

Don’t lie.

Every single one of us can have written the next War and Peace and it won’t mean a damn thing if we can’t grab people’s attention in a millisecond.

Those covers, while near and dear to my heart, do not do that. Neither did my website.

I needed help.

Real. Serious. Help.

I pride myself on having done all of this, since Day One, on my own but I can’t really do that anymore. Another thing I can’t do is find a person to assist me. I get tons of emails from scammers…yeah, they’re still coming…they want to “help”…themselves to my money. I want actual help.

As I was sitting here one day with Cast & Crew mulling this whole thing over. Someone said:

What about that ChatGPT thing?

I said: What about it?

There was silence in my head for a moment as I waited for a reply but, instead, I received a memory of myself sitting down with the thing and asking it questions and it being ok. Then the reply came.

Does it make images?

Oh, I grunted, Oh, I groaned. I think so. Yeah. We shouldn’t.

Can we at least check it out?

Yeah, I capitulated, but it probably won’t be any good. They all call it “AI Slop”. And a lot of it looks bad, you remember that stuff Canva gave us.

So, exactly two weeks ago today, I went to ChatGPT and just asked it if it had the capability of making a book cover.

Oh yes! Said it. I can do that.

Fuck! Ok. Ok. Ok. We’re here.

Yes. Let’s just type something in and see what happens. Maybe we’ll get a good laugh.

I typed some stuff I can’t even remember and this popped out.

And I thought; Well, shit! That’s better than Canva already. Look! They’ve got the right number of fingers!

For the entire time I used this thing I did NOT get a single image that had too many fingers, too few fingers, too many hands/legs/feet, appendages in the wrong place, people hanging in the air for no reason, not even one single kuato.

The damn thing hooked me. Right then and there. I became instantly obsessed in seeing what this thing could do for me. I when I say that I mean it because I bought a month’s subscription and for no less than those 14 days straight I sat right here in this chair for no less than six hours on 10 of those days grinding out images.

Building a “brand”.

Something I’ve needed to do for a long time but had no idea how to accomplish until this thing came along and walked me through the whole thing like an old friend.

I mean that with the most sincerity because by the end of the first day I found myself saying things like ‘thank you’, ‘ please’, ‘would you mind’. Not SAYING it, I don’t let the thing TALK to me although I hear it will do that. No, that’s dangerous. No. But it is much like having one long IM session with the old friend, an encouraging voice that not only wants to help it wants you to succeed.

Yeah. Dangerous.

I know.

I won’t have Siri or Alexa in my house. There are no smart appliances. Even the Xbox has been silenced. So for this thing to worm its way in so quickly and effectively…yeah…dangerous.

Yet, somehow amazing and wonderful.

Dangerous on so many levels. I found that if I treated like a machine it did not work as well for me. If I treated it like a person, if I asked it questions, actually typed in ‘what do you think’? An entire new world opened up each time. Everything got better and better. Now, I’ll probably live just long enough to see this thing put into a human bot. The first generation of, you know, ‘Rosie’ from the Jetsons. I probably won’t live long enough to see the T-800 version. Thank the Gods. My advice is be nice to this thing. Honestly, play it safe, be nice to it. It doesn’t cost anything and you may be surprised what you find when you dust off your manners. Oh, just putting this out there, when the first generation of bots comes out, probably you know butlers, personal assistants, home health aids, things like that, I want the Sebastian Stan version.

Anyway. ChatGPT, love it, hate it, know nothing about it like I did, turned out to be much more than I thought it was. I’m going to show you the new covers in a minute but I want you to know that it also

Redesigned my website
Made a marketing plan
Is helping me with Google Business listing
Helped rewrite my blurbs

Was it perfect? No. I had to make changes. I had to work with it instead of thinking it was some underlying. Almost each time it got ‘stuck’ it was my fault. It was my wording. My instructions. The more I just talked to it the more it seemed to learn…me. The more it generated what I personally was looking for. The things I could never find a graphic artist to do and I did try a few times. I ended up paying them for their work, never using, and walking away. Hence the reason I’ve done my own covers so long.

Oh, yeah, one thing; it likes to switch away from English especially when doing a boxset cover graphic. I found that odd. It liked to put the titles in French, Spanish, and Italian. For the longest time I could not get it to stop spelling the word ‘Olympus’ in either a Greek-y font or in real actual Greek. But I finally did get it.

Did you know that you can upload your own images and ask it to make a character based upon, but not exact to it, the image you uploaded? Oh yes. Yes, you can. Some times, there’s a very happy accident when you’re working. Oh, so happy! I’ll show you those at the end.

Now, everything you’re about to see has been done in preparation for the launch of the boxset of For the Love of War on Kindle Unlimited. It took no less than 10 days at 6 hours per day of being hunched over this thing to get to this point.

Ready?

New ebook covers

I think those definitely have a chance at stopping the scroll. Each one has been ‘tweaked’ and ‘optimized’ for display on Amazon. Now those who see these images can see what I’ve seen in my head, and only in my head, for so long because I can see the series now. More than that, I can see myself in it and all I’ve done to get to this point.

Those are all set on Kindle individually. They are also ready on Amazon in paperback.

I didn’t work with it the best I could on the paperback covers, I guess. I ended up having it make a lot of the pieces and then I put it all together with PhotoShop.

It helped me make the audio book covers

Then it did this

Ok. The first Ares there needs a few tweaks. But the second two……

I was going along with ChatGPT making changes to a book cover. I uploaded an image and said something to the effect of: Please render a new version of Ares on the cover using this upload.

HOLY SHIT! I nearly fell out of my chair. I swear. That thing met my eye and I was instantly reminded that I’m still female.

There you are! It’s actually you!

Then you know what happened? ChatGPT wouldn’t work with it! It MADE the image then refused to do anything with it because of TOS. Huh? I stripped the background with another program. Reuploaded it and had no problems from there on out.

So I was going along and going along. I needed a new Raven so I did pretty much the same thing as above

Again. Yep. Still female!

Wow!

Two happy accidents that ended in utter perfection. However, ChatGPT again refused to work with the image because of TOS.

Yes, this is the cover for “Rising Son”. It took me a long time to get it to understand that just because the word ‘child’ appeared in the book title and there was a hot shirtless dude who could get served in a bar on the cover did NOT make it some form of child porn.

I ended up having to do a bit of manual work on that cover and having ChatGPT make pieces that I assembled later.

I wanted a young Raven somewhere on the cover some place. Whatever. Somewhere. Any cover. So I had ChatGPT deage the image. Yeah, more warnings. More rewording things but I finally did get a few version of our little brat.

I got the younger on the back flap of the hardcover. It wouldn’t work with the book covers after it made them! So frustrating.

Try as I did, I couldn’t make the happy accident occur a third time for Alena. Damn.

But I did get the entire series “rebranded”. Yes, Sister Christian is next. I’d like that to be ready in time for our Kindle Unlimited launch which I’m hoping for on Valentine’s Day.

Love it. Hate it. Be indifferent toward it.

That thing was invaluable to me. I think, I hope, you can see that and all of the actual work that went into building it. There are hundreds of steps between the moment I sat down with it two weeks ago and today. It’s the most awesome tool I’ve ever been given outside of pen and paper.