Anything in the field of creative art
should come from a human soul.
All artwork in this article by Michelle Walls
As a registered Control Freak, I have always taken on the design duties for my book covers. This was a slow learning curve for me, becoming proficient in tools such as Adobe PhotoShop and Daz Studio for creating and posing figures.
More recently, though, I have found a wealth of AI-generated images available on the internet, and guess what? They can be used to make really good, impactful covers. I composed some covers for forthcoming books and was very pleased with the results.
But something inside of me was not happy.
When I create a fictional character in my stories, they are composed of words formed by me, a live (albeit pretty weird) human being. My writing, my characters, carry the touch of my own soul with them. Anything in the field of creative art should come from a human soul.
Don’t get me wrong here. I really believe there is a place for AI to truly help humanity, AI can solve problems, find cures, and do all sorts of stuff. I even use the occasional AI picture to go with blog articles (it’s cheaper!!) But there is a point where AI limits us. Crushes us.
So I decided to reach out and engage a living, human artist to do some character sketches for me. I’d never done this before though, so even thinking about it took me outside of my comfort zone. Plus … Control Freak, remember?
To that end, working with Michelle Walls is a delight. She takes on each character as a challenge, producing something to my specification and, at the same time, something which is different and more exciting. She produces a rough ‘ideas’ sketch first, and then a full draft version for me to comment on (so, yeah, I still have that feeling of control, even if it is buried way under the fantastic skills of another creative). She has so far produced a number of characters from my Forgotten Wings series.
Now I have her helping me with one of my next book projects, a collection of short stories, which follows on from Arrows at the Rainbow, entitled One Beautiful People.
Michelle has brought Azti to life. With magic! No AI should ever be licensed to practice magic.