Neil A. Hogan Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer

There have been huge strides made in the past few years by AIs in creating digital humans that look life-like. Generated Photos is the latest in a long line of face creation services, but this one is a lot easier to use for those who want to create home-made book covers with people on them – 100,000 copyright-free images to download from a Google Drive.

Just give them your details so that they can on-sell your information to one of their service providers, promise you’ll always refer back to Generated Photos when you use their photos, and you’re then directed to the drive. Zip and download and sort at leisure.

What does this mean for fiction writers, exactly? If you do a search through ebooks on Amazon, you’ll quickly find that the newest best sellers have people on the cover. Faces sell. And in the highest selling genre of romance, if you don’t have faces on the cover of your ebook it’s unlikely to do as well.

It’s fairly easy to make a book cover if you’ve got a free graphics design program and have read the help file. It’s much harder, financially, if you’ve got to put a picture of someone on it. If you’re an indie publisher just starting out or with a limited budget, trying to get copyright to a person’s face is going to hold you back from what you should be doing, which is writing. Outsourcing is the next best option, but because cover makers have to pay rights to use faces, good book covers usually start at around US$300.

Those of us who have avoided this cost have done so to our detriment. Fiction covers with objects don’t sell nearly as well as covers with faces. But now, with free AI generated faces, and no copyright to pay, you could be making endless covers yourself from the comfort of your own computer.

Of course, I’m not suggesting you simply take one of their face pictures and just give it a background and a title. But, now you’ve got an easier way to add people into your cafe scene cover or your mountain climbing cover or your ghetto streets cover without worrying about copyright. We can finally use models on the cover of our books that are as fictional as the characters inside them!

This also helps create more book-cover-making businesses. If you’re already selling covers, now you can drop your prices for future covers as you can save on buying stock photo images of models. I expect that, within a year, we’re going to see a lot more premade covers on the market using convincing AI generated images.

HOWEVER! We have that ‘Uncanny Valley’ situation first discussed by Masahiro Mori in 1970 that needs to be addressed. The idea is that people feel a certain amount of creepiness from looking at not entirely real-looking humans. (Check out the AI’s training gif below. The longer you watch the more creeped out you get!) For the AI-generated photos, if you have an artistic eye, you can see that there are minor discrepancies when you look closely enough. For someone with limited artistic skill, their intuition will still kick in and they’ll wonder why an image is making them feel uneasy. But, with 100,000 photos to choose from, you should be able to find a picture that’s ideal.

And, at reduced sizes or in images not for zooming, any minor problem is unlikely to be noticed anyway. For advertising brochures, website promotions, late night ads or social media ads, and other places where the images will be seen briefly and forgotten, they’re perfect for replacing billions of dollars worldwide in modeling fees. And, if you are going to go a bit larger, applying an artistic filter or some other brush style to the image to make it look like art rather than a picture could be the way to go in the short term.

So, with an infinite number of free or low cost faces just a few taps away, why would any business ever need to hire a model again?