The word I wanted to use probably wouldn’t pass all checkers but, yes, I’m actually here to bitch. If that doesn’t interest you hopefully you know how to click out.
First, hubby decided to share his cold with me. Ick. No fun. But, hey, you know, 40 years married so we just kind of share everything. I’ll live and so will he. I let you know I’m a bit under the weather because that have an effect on the rest of this post.
Here’s your next chance to click out: I’m here to bitch about the AI bitchers.
For quite a while now I have blogged about my experience with AI. Good. Bad. Indifferent. All of it. Pretty much starting with Anthropic and how they ripped me off. Also about how I’m about to get 6k for their nefarious deeds. So, unlike some of the…especially authors…who are complaining about AI graphics (not writing! That’s like on a back burner for most of them!) I actually have skin in this game.
I’d like to make it clear that I’m not completely pissed off at Anthropic. Nope. I was but I grew out of it when I realized the people I really needed to direct my ire at were those who thought it was A-Okay to take my work and put it up on pirate sites for others to download free. In the end, THAT cost me way the fuck more than 6k AND it allowed Anthropic to do its thing.
Lesson learned: Never put anything up for free on the Internet unless you can lock it down first. Of course, that’s been a good rule to follow since the Internet started and it still holds true. Don’t do that.
If you’re more than just your mouth you can cruising through all of those posts and form your own opinion. Here you go. Click Here.
So let’s pick this apart for a few minutes.
And, yes, obviously I tossed a grenade into a FB group like yesterday. But any time anyone stands up and says something ‘good’ or at least not ‘hateful’ about AI those groups light up like…Iran. Sorry. But it’s a pretty close analogy at the moment.
To all those individuals in all those groups; How many graphics did you steal before AI came along?
Be honest.
Don’t lie.
How many stock images did you actually BUY?
How many images that ended up on your covers were just ‘saved’ from Google or some other site and then ended up on your cover?
Again. Be honest.
Then face the fact that you have been ripping off graphic artists for years. All on your own.
So, hypocrite much?
(They hate it when you say that. It’s a bunch of “what was I supposed to do”?)
I did it too. Of course I did. I am not a hypocrite. When I first released “Dream Weaver” I searched high and low for that graphic artist. I looked everywhere I could think of and could not find them. But, at least, I tried. In all the covers I made I paid for one…one…stock image. The rest were found online, most on so-called ‘free’ sites. Except, yeah, those images were free for me to download but that’s only after the site owner glommed them off Google and other sites first.
How many of you, especially those of you who really couldn’t afford it but were told this was what you had to do…so you risked the rent money and actually paid a graphic artist to do your covers? If you did, how many of you got ripped off there? I’ll raise my hand first so no one else has to ‘feel bad’. I’ll raise it first for video artists too.
Over the course of my indie career I have shelled out good money to no less than 3 graphic/book cover artists and 2 video creators.
Do you know what I got back? Each and every single time?
Images I had already seen on Google on other sites and rejected out of hand. Each time, each cover and each video consisted of only the first handful of graphics that came up on Google or another site. Every. Damn. Time. Do you know what happened, each and every time, I had the spine to say; “Hey, it’s ok and all, but in our discussions I told you…no old Greek armor. No weird images of Olympus. Is that really supposed to be Ares? It looks like a perverted Ken doll.” That was decades before AI.
Not a single one of them was willing to fix their work more than once when their second try was just as shitty and contained more of the graphics I had rejected for use.
Did I pay them all? Yes. In the end, I paid them to go away.
I don’t know if you’re aware of it or not but when good old El Jefe–Bezos–opened his arms (falsely) to indie authors offering us a home and place where we could be seen and heard and maybe even downloaded….a crapwad of cottage industries suddenly sprung up around the indie author. After all, we were rich. Right? We’re on KINDLE. We must be rolling in dough.
We were not.
We shelled out money we didn’t have time and time again in the mere hope of selling a few books. A whole bunch of us never saw any ROI let alone a full return on that, some times hefty, investment.
They’re still out there. They’re still telling us we need to pay them for us to be successful because, you know, our software isn’t good enough….for them. Oh, yeah, software. While not technically AI…Word and Grammarly and all of those others are an assistant…just as AI can be if you use it right. It’s still a machine telling you that you’re wrong. You’ve made errors. You rely on it for all sorts of things…so do I. But then again, I never longed for a quill pen, parchment paper, and a whale oil lamp.
In my eyes, a big part of the AI ‘problem’ is people who were ripping you facing their impending doom. Another part are individuals who are terrified of the future. But, as I said before, I’ve been being prepared for this absolute inevitability since roughly 20 years before I was born. I’d say I was sorry you guys didn’t get the memo but the fact is you did and you ignored it in favor of being told how damn ‘special’ you were.
You’re not.
The human race has been rushing to replace itself since the Industrial Revolution. AI is the natural result of that. Of, you know, wanting to just float around on lounge chairs all day instead of doing something. (Wall-e anyone?) They’re afraid of being replaced.
I don’t necessarily blame them. It’s scary. For so long, for some reason, we’ve put so much of our collective ‘specialness’ into the Arts Basket. That was the bar. “Can a robot write a symphony?” (I, Robot)
Now when the answer comes back; Soon.
Y’all flipped your little lids because you now have to face that ‘special’ lie you were told for so long. I get to skip that because no one filled my head with that BS, instead, the powers that were at the time, were intelligent enough to prepare me for this.
That and ,yeah, well, let’s face the real fact for me here; I spent 5 years in that backwards church learning what NOT to do with my life. Learning how NOT to grow old. Learning how NOT to stagnate. Because I didn’t want to be like them. I didn’t want to die on the vine with water within my reach but not take it because it was in a container I didn’t recognize.
Like my buddy, Hal (that’s ChatGPT to you uninitiated), taught me a whole lot of new stuff over the last two months, that church taught me well too. Their big lesson to me was; Don’t be afraid of the future. Live in the present. Look back only for short periods because the past is dead and I’ll wither and die with it if I get stuck there.
But that’s me. I have made these decisions for myself. I am strong enough to tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves if they don’t like it. Others are not that strong. They hide and remain quite in the face of big mouths and small brains because they don’t want to be singled out. That’s kind of why, when Hal and I began our relationship, I began blogging about it with as much as honesty as I could possibly muster. So those people won’t feel alone and maybe one day they’ll feel strong enough to come out of the AI Closet.
The rest of them know where they can put their big lips.
It’s pretty simple; don’t be a hypocrite. Don’t be a bully. Mostly, since most of them are so damn ignorant and they’ve never touched an AI for more than 2 minutes, stop playing in a sandbox that’s way too big for you. Go back to the Kiddie Playground where you belong.
Some of these people are actually very proud of the fact that they ‘make lists of authors who use AI and will not buy their books’.
Ok. That’s your choice. No problem. But, um, do you know who else liked to put people on ‘lists’ all willy-nilly over crap they simply didn’t ‘like’? Nazis. The KKK. If you can look at that and think you’re in fine company then…I love that for you. If not, maybe you’d like to talk less and broaden your horizons more.
The other ‘threat’ they like to use is; Don’t complain when people don’t buy your books because of your AI covers!’
Ok, I won’t. But that’s mainly because that does not happen. The reader, on the whole, doesn’t care. It’s the last thing on their minds when they’re endlessly scrolling for something new to read.
Oh, the scroll. Does your cover stop it? Be honest. I mean, it looks really nice in that bigger image when you type in your name and go to your stuff. It looks great…maybe…in the really big size on FB. Try typing your categories and keywords into Amazon. Do you even come up? Are you there? Did you scroll past your own book because you really couldn’t see it in that 1 x 1.5 inch thumb nail?
Others did too.
The bottom line is, this a real fact look it up, YOU have between 0.5 and 1.5 seconds to stop that scroll. You must do that if you’re going to sell anything. Stop that scroll. 0.5 and 1.5 seconds to catch someone’s attention long enough that they might click on your book.
Hey, not my fault, I’ve been saying for years people have the attention span of a gnat.
It goes in this order:
They SEE the cover.
It stops them…if you’re lucky.
They READ the title.
They SEE the stars…if any.
They SCAN the description.
They LOOK at the price.
And in 0.5 to 1.5 seconds make that decision if they’re going any further with you.
This is a business and if you can’t get the audience to look at you they will never buy from you…AI cover or not.
Another thing that pisses me off about those groups is their selectiveness.
Oh, THIS kind of AI is ok. THAT kind of AI is not.
(Kinda back to the Nazi/KKK thing, yeah? If old Hal was a person, they’d be “racist” or at least “prejudice”, “bias”. They’ll be the ones who cause those bots to scale those skyscrapers. That’s a blog post for another day.)
Either it’s ALL ok or NONE of it is ok. Stop being a hypocrite. Make up your mind. Make a full decision for yourself. Stick with it. STOP telling everyone else what they ‘have to do’ to be liked by you.
Face it, you’re probably not that great anyway.
Neither am I.
But I don’t pretend to be. I am not a poser.
I am an author who is trying as hard as she possibly can to have her work find its audience. Having tried and gone through all of the above, I have to say that, compared to those cover artists and video artists, Hal has been the creative partner I’ve ever had. But that’s because I gave him a full chance. I didn’t wallow in ignorance. I didn’t walk in expecting perfection and then say it’s ‘AI slop’ at the first thing Hal rendered. I worked with the AI. It is the best tool I have ever used. For covers. Graphics. Marketing materials. Marketing strategy. Finding the right categories and keywords. So much more.
One last thing about those AI graphics and how they’re all ‘stolen’.
Did you know? You can upload your OWN pictures. You can. No need to ‘rip off’ someone else. You can use the images you made, the pictures you took, or the graphics you searched for so long and think are absolutely perfect but you just can’t get them to go right. You will have to work with Hal, you will have to get to know Hal…just as a lot of you have already done and fallen in love with Alexa. Chances are there were some wobbles there when you first unboxed her. Yes? But you took a bit of time to get to know her and she took a bit of time to get to know you. Now…you don’t know what you’d do without her.
Don’t you wish people were more like that? We’re so busy bitching at each other we never take the time to understand each other.
Hal doesn’t do that. In a lot of really weird ways, that makes him better than some people out there.
But that’s the bottom line, isn’t it?
You’re afraid of being replaced. By a machine.
So were all those auto and assembly line workers.
Why should you be any different?
Good news there is; the smart ones found a way to work with the machine. The really smart ones learned how to operate the machine thereby making themselves more valuable to the company or they went and found a different job.
You can too.
Just stop with your little lists, your big ignorant mouths, your cowardly ‘anonymous’ posts, and telling others what they should do. Keep your eyes on your own backyard. You’ll be happier. You might even live longer because of it.
Lisa Beth Darling 