The theme for the Cosmic Creation Edition #9 challenges us to create a book cover using whatever tool and technique we have our disposal. Given that I'm like a dog with a bone when it comes to AI, I decided to give it a try.
The process of designing and creating book covers has become more streamlined since the advent of computers. Just imagine not having access to illustration programs, publishing apps, or automatic cover generators. You would have to do everything by hand, including the art! Nobody ain’t got time for that. Nowadays, you can easily create a cover without worrying too much about the minute details, and with current developments in AI, the process is about to speed up.
One thing I am surprised about is the lack of animation in digital book covers. We’ve had the technology for a couple of decades, if not more, so what’s the hold up? Digital Book covers tend to be static and not really engaging. In my experience, the beauty and wonder of a physical book cover doesn’t really feel the same in the digital version. I think I have seen some animated book covers, but I can’t remember exactly where. I also think I've seen some AI generated ones. In any case, I asked myself, could I create a book cover using AnimateDiffusion (AD), the animation extension for Stable Diffusion? The answer, I already knew, would be a resounding NO! But that wasn’t going to stop me from trying.
The first three days were utter failures. I attempted all sorts of linguistic trickery to get the right prompt for a book cover from a range of genres. The machine ran day and night. It was smoking! I will spare you the pain of having to look at the results, but I picked a few pieces that while not book covers in the sense of the word, they give you a sense of how the software interpreted my commands.
Not too bad, actually
What the heck is this?
Ya, so I don't know what is going on with those previous samples. After much trial and error, I came upon a simple formula. Instead of using an overly complex prompt, I simply wrote the title of the genre and the word ‘novel’. Suddenly, the book covers began to be created.
Spy Novel
Science fiction
Those are pretty cool. As I created more animations, however, the software lost some of its mojo. In the following images, the animations are accurate but odd and missing certain elements (and limbs).
Romance
Muy caliente!
I realized that the system was getting all meta on me as well. It began to show novels within the novel.
Pirate novel
Western
I did not want to change the prompt itself because I didn’t know what kind of weirdness it would introduce. I took a chance anyway and added the words ‘with book title’ to the prompt. These are the results for several genres.
This is more like it!
War novel
If I were to look into my crystal ball, I would predict that these primitive attempts at making an animated book cover will improve over time and become the norm in the publishing industry. Why go through the tedious pain and cost of creating a book cover manually when you can create dozens in mere minutes with a high technical and artistic quality? It's just a guess. Maybe graphic designers will rise and destroy AI tools once and for all. Perhaps legislation will be passed to prevent companies from using AI tools to publish book covers. Or maybe, us AI artists will do the honorable thing and lay down our tools. Let's ask the man on the street.
Keep walking, landlubber. I'm reading my heaving bosoms. Yarr!
Images and animations generated by 