AI, or not AI, that is the question.

Or, in a world where it’s increasingly difficult to believe anything we read or see as being real and not faked, what is the answer? When AI was in it’s infancy it was easy to spot the faked images – the missing hands or the seven fingers were an easy giveaway. As techniques have become more sophisticated it’s not such an easy spot, and it’s largely the images and the adverts that have been attracting my attention of late. More specifically in relation to the book world. The glossy facebook videos of chiselled heroes and the proliferation of look alike bookish promos are hide to avoid. We’ve all seen them and possibly not even thought about them, but just scrolled by. However, it was an animation/video I spotted promoting the latest book for an author that I read that got me thinking. Along with several bookish threads on, not unsurprisingly, Threads, relating to the proliferation of AI romance books on Amazon.

As many of you know, I read a lot of romance, and a lot of American/Canadian indie authors who participate in the Kindle Unlimited programme. Many are complaining that the space is being flooded by AI written works that are ultimately a)reducing their royalties and b) proliferating poorly written, faked works which reflects badly on everybody. One ‘author’ under fire is currently sitting in the number 1 spot for firefighter romance and 217 in the whole Kindle store. The ‘author’ who has no bio on Amazon, ‘writes’ each book with another similarly bio less author. The firefighter romance is one in a series of 72, and her other series encompasses 144 books. All of the covers are AI generated and the content is believed to be similarly created. The worrying thing is that these books are garnering large numbers of positive reviews – whether they are all legitimate readers is unlikely. The belief is that they are bot generated reviews. However, on a platform such as Kindle Unlimited where the reader has already paid for a subscription to be lulled into reading a book with fake reviews is not costing them anymore, is generating income for the ‘author’ and taking readers and income away from legitimate authors.

We are all aware of authors having had their hard work stolen to create writing programmes. Even myself along with other bloggers are aware of our blogs having been trawled by bots. To what end in my case I’m not sure, but the stats are revealing. My views have been growing over time, as one would expect with regular posts. On average I’d normally expect between 5,000 to 6,000 views per month, this ties in with my 70,000 view total for 2024. Last year, my posts were more hit and miss, especially in the latter part of the year and yet my views jumped to 141,000. In November and December alone my views were 83,000 – all largely from China. This year, when my output has also been limited my views are currently standing at 143,000, already more than last year. This time it seems to be the Americans that are interested. What I do know is that these are not views from legitimate readers and the posts that are being read are largely posts like this, the opinion pieces or personal text based features rather than the Five on Friday or book round ups. Though if they’re using my posts to help train AI God help them. I’m the first to admit my grasp of grammar is shocking.

So with all that said, back to the matter in hand AI generated artwork. My main gripe is while the writing community is, quite rightly, up in arms about AI created books they appear to be less concerned by AI created artwork and ads. To me, this seems like hypocrisy because they are two sides of the same coin. You can’t object to someone stealing your creative work to profit from and then use AI generated work which has effectively stolen someone else’s creativity. Unfortunately, with respect to cover artwork, the water has been further muddied by authors who have, in good faith, employed cover artists to produce their artwork, only to discover the designer has ‘copied’ or redrawn an AI created image. My answer to this has been to decide to avoid authors who are using AI to advertise their work, whether that being as cover art or in adverts and promos. But, I go back to what I said earlier. I can’t always tell whether it is AI or not. Also, particularly with romance novels, the proliferation of cartoony covers and non pictoral images makes it even harder. With some authors and readers also making a similar point about AI generated artwork being contradictory wouldn’t it be nice to see the designers credited at the front of the book so that readers could easily check. With some of the modelled covers, many readers will recognise those taken by Wander Aguiar, who is himself also a cover model. Those covers are always attributed as he, quite rightly, merits the acknowledgement. Why are we not doing this as standard for all cover artwork. I can’t see that authors would have a problem and I as a reader would appreciate not having to guess. Having found the above advert for Pixazo, a website offering free book covers I’m already questioning some cover art on books I own as now being AI. It’s also a slippery slope, if you can’t trust what’s on the outside, what about the legitimacy of the written word inside.

I know we’ll all have different views on AI. Just as I am not a fan and would like to avoid it, there are others that welcome it as a useful tool. I also appreciate that for many struggling indie authors an AI cover seems like a gift, but it’s ultimately drawn (excuse the pun) from the collective work of other artists. Whatever side you are on, I’d just appreciate some honesty and transparency. Those happy to use it, shouldn’t be ashamed to admit it, and if they are then I’d question why. Those who are opposed to AI I’m sure would like to see all creative work credited and their own credibility upheld.

On a more sober note, if the above didn’t give pause for thought, bear in mind the cost of AI to the climate. It’s reported that by 2030 AI could use as much water as 1.3 billion people as it’s used for cooling the data centres. In artwork terms alone an AI image uses 1-2 litres of water per generation. Please let us just be mindful and above all honest.

PS In writing this I have also refused the WordPress offer to ‘improve with AI’. I want my work to be mine, flaws and all.

Cenotaph

A Tale of Love Beyond the Tomb

I went each evening to the tomb because the dead had no one else.

It stood beyond the last lamps of the village, where the road narrowed into a path and the path, in time, surrendered itself to nettles, thorns, and the pale roots of ancient trees. There the hill rose like the back of some buried beast, and in its side, half-swallowed by ivy and weather, was the stone door behind which my beloved lay.

No name remained upon the lintel. The rain had taken it. Or the years. Or perhaps those who had carved it had done so lightly, as if afraid that naming the dead too deeply would make death more permanent. But I knew the place. I knew the stone. I knew the silence that gathered before it like a servant waiting for orders.

I had seen the black carriage pass beneath the sycamores. I had heard the bell. I had stood among the mourners while the wind pressed their coats against their bodies and made their veils tremble like wings. I had watched the door sealed with mortar. I had watched the priest lower his head. I had watched the others turn away.

Afterward, when they returned to their bread, their fires, their sleep, I remained.

Then I came the next evening.

And the next.

And in this way the years began.

I brought what the seasons allowed. In spring, violets. In summer, white roses stolen from the wall of the abandoned rectory. In autumn, red leaves that looked already wounded. In winter, when the earth refused all tenderness, I brought my breath cupped in my hands, warming nothing.

I never came armed.

This was often remarked upon in the village, though never to my face. The road was lonely. Wolves had once been seen in the upper wood. Worse than wolves, it was said, were the men who slept in the ruined mill and came out at dusk with knives beneath their coats. But I carried no pistol, no blade, no staff. I carried only the small candle I lit upon the lowest step.

I do not know why I refused protection. Perhaps because grief itself had rendered me defenseless. Perhaps because one does not visit the beloved as though entering battle. Perhaps because I believed, with a conviction I never spoke aloud, that no evil thing would dare approach a tomb already so well attended.

At the stone door I always said the same words.

“I have come.”

Nothing more.

It seemed enough.

In the beginning I wept. Later I spoke. Later still I sat in silence until the candle guttered and the darkness of the wood became one with the darkness of the tomb. There were evenings when I told small things: that the baker’s daughter had married the cooper’s son; that lightning had struck the church spire but spared the bell; that the old dog who used to follow the funeral processions had died beneath the market table; that the village had forgotten certain songs.

There were other evenings when I confessed what I dared not tell the living: that I had grown envious of those whose dead were buried in the churchyard, near bells, near footsteps, near the innocent disturbances of children; that I sometimes feared the face within the tomb had altered beyond recognition; that I could no longer remember the exact sound of the voice I had loved, only the wound it left by ceasing.

Still I came.

The villagers first pitied me. Then they avoided me. Finally they made of my devotion a superstition.

Mothers frightened their children with me. Do not linger after dusk, they said, or you will see the mourner on the hill. Young men, drunk on harvest ale, dared one another to follow me, but none came farther than the black pond where the reeds whispered without wind. Once I found a crude figure made of straw hanging from a branch near the path. It wore a scrap of mourning cloth. I took it down, carried it to the tomb, and burned it in my candle flame.

The smoke drifted beneath the door.

That was the first time I thought I heard movement within.

It was faint. So faint that a sensible mind would have named it settling stone, or a root shifting in the earth, or the sigh of air through cracks. But grief does not possess a sensible mind. Grief has ears everywhere. Grief hears the dead turning over beneath the world.

I placed my palm against the door.

The stone was cold.

“I have come,” I whispered.

From within there came nothing.

Yet after that night, the tomb seemed changed.

Not opened. Not visibly disturbed. But alert. The ivy appeared to have loosened its grip around the lintel. The candle flame bent toward the door though no wind touched it. The flowers I laid upon the step vanished by morning, though no animal tracks marked the earth.

At first I thought the villagers had stolen them to mock me. But who among them would climb that path before dawn? Who would dare lay fingers upon offerings given to the dead? No. Something received them.

This knowledge, if knowledge it was, neither comforted nor terrified me. It merely deepened the ritual. I brought better flowers. I trimmed the candle wick. I brushed dead leaves from the threshold. I spoke less and listened more.

Years passed.

The village altered as villages do, by slow betrayals. The mill collapsed inward. The inn changed hands. Children became adults and looked at me with the same uneasy curiosity their parents once had. The priest died and was replaced by a younger man with pale eyes and clean hands. He once stopped me near the church gate and asked, gently, whether I thought my nightly pilgrimage was good for my soul.

“For my soul?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I looked past him to the churchyard, where the dead lay safely labeled beneath crosses and stones, each one accounted for, each one furnished with a place among the living.

“My soul,” I said, “is not buried here.”

He did not trouble me again.

There were nights when I almost believed the tomb loved me in return.

In rain, the threshold remained strangely dry. In winter, no snow gathered against the door. Once, when fever shook me so violently that I could scarcely climb the hill, I found the stone warm beneath my hand. Another night, upon arriving late, I discovered my candle already lit.

I knelt before it a long while.

I told no one.

For who could have understood? Those who have never loved the silent dead think silence is empty. They do not know how crowded it is. They do not know the multitude that gathers in one withheld word, one vanished face, one unopened door.

My body failed before my devotion did.

First the breath. Then the knees. Then the hands, which trembled so badly that I spilled wax upon the stone. I began to leave earlier each evening and return later, for the path grew longer though the hill did not move. Some nights I slept beside the tomb, waking before dawn with frost in my hair and my cheek against the step.

It was then that the dreams began.

I dreamed I stood inside the tomb. Not outside, not kneeling at the threshold, but within. The chamber was larger than it could possibly be, descending far beneath the hill by corridors of black stone. Niches lined the walls, and in each niche lay something I had lost: a child’s shoe; a broken instrument; a letter never sent; a lock of hair; a bowl of soup cooling beside an empty chair; a song I had once intended to write; a prayer abandoned halfway through because no answer came.

At the end of the corridor was a door.

Behind it, someone breathed.

I would wake with soil beneath my fingernails.

The last evening came in November.

All day the sky had lowered until it seemed the world was trapped beneath a lid of iron. Crows gathered on the church roof. The air smelled of rain and extinguished lamps. Villagers later said they watched me pass and knew something final moved beside me, though I walked alone.

I carried no flowers. None remained. I carried no candle either, for my hands could no longer shield the flame.

I climbed slowly.

The black pond gave back no reflection. The trees did not stir. Even the brambles seemed to withdraw from the path, as though making way for what had already been decided.

When I reached the tomb, the door stood open.

Not wide. Only a little. Enough for the dark to show itself.

I was not afraid.

Or if I was, fear had become indistinguishable from longing.

For many years I had spoken through stone. Now the stone had answered.

I pressed my shoulder to the door. It yielded with a sound like a breath being taken after long restraint. The darkness inside was complete, yet not hostile. It surrounded me with the intimacy of closed eyes.

I stepped in.

The chamber was smaller than my dreams. Bare walls. Low ceiling. A shelf cut into the rock. Earth beneath my feet. The air held no corruption, no sweetness of decay, no ancient bitterness of sealed flesh. It was cold and pure.

I reached toward the shelf.

My hand found nothing.

I searched the chamber wall to wall. My fingers swept stone, dust, root, emptiness. There was no coffin. No shroud. No bone. No ring. No remnant of the beloved body to which I had given my years.

Nothing.

Only then did I understand what the word meant.

Not tomb.

Not grave.

Cenotaph.

The realization did not strike like lightning. It opened beneath me like a floor giving way.

All those evenings. All those flowers. All those whispered reports from the world. All the candles. All the kneeling. All the weather endured. All the love poured through stone into a chamber that had never held the dead.

I laughed then.

The sound horrified me.

It rose from my chest like something winged and wounded. I laughed until I could not breathe, and then the laughter broke apart and became weeping. I lowered myself to the floor and pressed my forehead to the dust.

“Not here,” I said.

The words seemed to pass through the chamber and into some deeper hollow beneath the hill.

“Not here.”

And then, after a long while, I felt beneath my hands what I had never felt outside the door.

Warmth.

It came not from the shelf, nor from the walls, nor from any body hidden there. It came from the earth itself, faint but living, as though all the years of attendance had gathered under the stone and kindled there.

My eyes adjusted.

Upon the empty shelf lay the flowers.

All of them.

The violets. The roses. The cedar. The red leaves. The pitiful winter twigs. The offerings of every season lay in a heap of impossible preservation, neither dead nor alive, neither fresh nor withered. Each retained the form of the day I had brought it. Each remembered my hand.

The tomb had been empty.

But it had not been indifferent.

I understood then—not with the mind, which is always late to mercy, but with the ruined heart—that I had not kept vigil over bones. I had kept vigil over faithfulness itself. I had honored the absent. I had loved without proof. I had returned to the place that could not answer until the returning became its own reply.

The beloved was not there.

Yet love had been there.

And perhaps love, having nowhere else to lay its head, had made of that emptiness a dwelling.

At dawn they found the tomb open.

They found the flowers.

They found my coat folded on the threshold and my shoes placed neatly beside the stone, as though I had entered some house where footwear was not permitted.

They did not find me.

Some said I had wandered into the wood and died beneath leaves. Some said I had thrown myself into the black pond, though the pond gave up nothing. Some said the devil had taken me, for the villagers preferred damnation to mystery.

But the young priest, older by then and less certain, stood a long while before the open chamber. He saw the flowers. He saw the two dark impressions in the dust where knees had rested. He touched the stone shelf and drew back his hand.

It was warm.

After that, the path changed.

Not all at once. Gothic mercies do not hurry. But the brambles loosened. The pond cleared. In spring, flowers grew thick around the tomb, though none had ever rooted there before. Those who grieved without graves began to come: mothers whose sons were lost at sea; wives whose husbands vanished in war; children who remembered faces no one else would name; old men mourning the selves they had outlived.

They came ashamed at first.

Then less so.

Each stood before the empty chamber and whispered into it what I had whispered for years.

“I have come.”

And though no corpse rested there, and though no voice replied, many left with lighter steps.

For the tomb held no body.

It held attendance.

It held the honor of loving what could not be recovered.

It held the terrible mercy of absence made holy by return.

And beneath the stone, where no beloved had ever lain, something like a heart continued to keep warm.

RE: https://writing.exchange/@hiisikoloart/116040157868839855

This cover is still up for grabs, if anyone wants 100% human-made art for their book cover! <3

Price includes - original title work, separate PNG of the titles for you to use in marketing, any necessary eBook adjustments in sizing, cover contract with basic rights over the cover art distribution (full rights must be purchaced separately).

Can be made into paperback version, and into series.

#art #bookstodon #author #bookcover #bookcoverart #digitalart #NoAI #HumanMade

'Klar Schiff!' #FotoVorschlag

Raum-Schiffe 🚀 & #sciencefictionart

• Die Nadelsuche - H. Clement
• Das Floß - S. Baxter
• Die unendliche Reise - B.W. Aldiss
• Welt zwischen den Sternen - A.Panshin
• Das letzte Raumschiff - M. Coney
• Im Herzen des Kometen - Benford/Brin
• Ringwelt - L. Niven
• Der tote Raumfahrer - J.P. Hogan
• Raumschiff Titanic - T.Jones / D.Adams

1/2 🧵

#FotoVorschlag #sciencefictionart #scifi #books #scifibooks #classicscifi #heynesf #BookCoverArt #spaceship #raumschiff

New anthology cover.

#anthology #cover #coverdesign #books #bookCoverArt #weirdHorrorFiction #indieAuthor #disturbingRead

This one is more expensive and also the most detailed piece of art I have probably ever made. It took me a year to finish, and it is selling for 500€ (incl, paypal fee and VAT).

Please share so people can see I can do more than just silly comics. :D

Direct buy: https://ko-fi.com/s/0e5c6516e9
Or part payment options at: [email protected]

You can also commission something similiar if you like!
#art #illustration #bookcoverart #bookillustration #Bookstodon #books #bookcovers #NOAI

Here is Molly in her new Yarmouth home with daughter Katie. You might recall that Molly was the first to send me a selfie with my book.

#bookselfies #princesscheyenne #bookcoverart #famousbostonians #celebritymemoirs