Convince Me Not to Give Up

I know I just sent one of these out, but stay with me, this is important. You can skip my long-winded anecdotes, but please scroll down read the part about my cover.

I hate AI. I hate AI for all the reasons we should: The massive waste or water, the fact that it is based solely on stolen work from artist. I also hate the fact that is has been crammed into all my software applications at my day job. Adobe is clogged up and crashes because of the AI that’s been crammed in. I have to close out AI assistance that are obscuring the view of critical information in the PDF I am working in. Co-Pilot is useless and again makes everything run slower. Gemini is taking up valuable screen space by attempting to summarize a bank statement (which offers no value because I’m often looking for a specific piece of information). It is like little, tiny annoyances and extra clicks all crammed into my poor computer, that’s already huffing and puffing to calculate an absurd amount of rows on some over engineered spreadsheet I’ve created.

Most of all, I hate AI because at any minute, the internet can decide that the thing you worked so hard on, the book, the art, whatever, is AI. Even if you have painstakingly crafted that piece of art, obsessed over it, prefect it. Even if you are firm in your stance against AI, even if you love creating. The internet loves an AI witch hunt.

Writing was a hard-won victory for me. I’m dyslexic. I have written about that here before; it’s not a secret. I was in special education with an IEP until I was in the 9^th grade. But I have always loved stories. They felt like an addiction, and from a young age, before I started kindergarten, I would retreat in my mind to write my own (I don’t talk about that at all). I loved TV and movies, especially things like The Never Ending Story. My parents used to read to me and I loved that too.

I was a late reader, 10 or 11, before I read with enough fluency to be able to enjoy books but once I did, it opened an entire world.

I had to repeat this process again when I started writing at around 12. My first attempts at writing were fanfiction. Getting through a thousand words was a multi-day affair and I would routinely get comments asking if English was my first language because my spelling and grammar were so bad. But god, I loved writing my ideas down. I loved writing fanfiction and in my 20s a long-winded original fiction project that will never see the light of day. I wrote over a million words of fiction before I decided to publish my first book. It took a lot of work to get the fluency to translate my thoughts through a language processing disorder onto paper. It was hard won, but damn it, I did. I learned to write a novel, on my own, through a lot of practice. The words I wrote, the words I agonized over and cried over and melted down over. These words ultimately landed a feature in the New York Times Book Review.

But I also did it because I love writing. Writing feels like the most amazing thing. Like letting your soul out on to paper. The absolute euphoria I feel when I am in a writing induced fugue state is impossible to describe. It’s almost like I can feel my brain lighting up as I connect the thoughts in my head to paper. I don’t make a ton of money off this venture. Actually, let’s be real, I am in the negative, but I have big girl money from my day job, and this is how I want to spend it. I hate calling writing a vanity project but actually, not in this context, this feels much better than the alternative: Running an AI slop factory.

I even prepared an Anti Generative AI statement as part of my promotional materials:

A note on Generative AI: M.J. Etkind is anti-generative AI. No part of the writing, editing, art or marketing of this book utilizes generative AI. The editing of this book was done by Mild Mannered editors who include an anti-generative AI clause in their contract. The cover was crafted by Miblart, whose terms and conditions explicitly state that generative AI is not used in any part of the cover design process. If you have additional questions surrounding M.J. Etkind’s Anti generative AI diligence, please contact mjetkind@izzihousebooks.com.

Which brings me to how AI has sent me through an existential crisis this weekend. This first is that my beloved cover for The Lone Wolf Paradox became a main character on threads because the cover has been accused of being AI generated. I don’t think it is. I used Miblart which has specific terms and conditions that state they don’t use AI. I specifically put in my notes for the cover work to Miblart that I am uninterested in AI. I vetted the cover through a series of author friends. When I re-asked this question from Miblart they again confirmed that AI has not been used.

But, in a now deleted response, a user on with over 18,000 followers declared my cover was most certainly AI generated with little evidence, starting a pile on. To all the people who defended me and my cover, thank you so much. Reading through the thread, it is clear that there is not a definitive answer, a reminder that AI looks real because it is based on stolen work and real work looks like AI for the same reason. I have to believe my cover is human versus an AI slop scam.

While Miblart has included pro AI material in some of their blogs (which I’m not a fan of) it did not seem indicative of their design philosophy when I was vetting them to do a third cover. Notably, we have seen a lot of companies discuss AI for the benefit of their investors, while reassuring their customer base that they remain AI free. Podium audio, who produced my audio book has been in a similar situation. It is a facet of capitalism but this does not make me think that either Miblart or Podium have used AI in anything that have produced for my books. It does mean there is a lot of investor pressure to hop on the AI train throughout and every day now feels like an AI minefield.

Ultimately, I was comfortable using them again as they did amazing covers for both The Witch of Wall Street and Dishwasher Safe.

Notably, I have also hired Kay Claire to do all the character art that goes with this book. This is also human made art. Further committing to my stance to only use human made art in my books.

Katy Summers also did beautiful work for the Witch of Wall Street.

I am now deep in the promotional cycle, with 175 books arriving today with this cover. I already have bookmarks and custom mailers made for this cover. I emailed 2,500 bookstores assuring them my cover is NOT AI as part of my bookstore marketing materials. Starting over with a new cover means a substantial financial loss, if I thought there was credible evidence that this cover was generated with AI, I would be more than willing to cut my losses and insist on a human made cover. I believe this is a human cover in a style that AI often replicates. I like this cover and have gotten a lot of positive feedback but I accept that it might not be a fan favorite like The Witch of Wall Street. That’s okay, I would rather a bad cover than an AI cover.

This morning, I woke up, feeling marginally better and more sure that I was going to continue on with the cover. That I am reasonable sure, as sure I can be without watching over the artist shoulder, that this is human generated cover and meets my anti generative AI stance, This all came crashing down when The New York Time had the audacity to publish a pro AI puff piece about an AI slop generator masquerading as a romance writer. I am having a harder and harder time reconciling with some the Times Journalism these days, even if the paper featured the Witch of Wall Street. It makes me feel a bit ill that my biggest bookish achievement has now been marred but a paper that seems to have little regard for human art.

AI generated slops feel like perfect encapsulation of late-stage capitalism. The sort of labor that people actually really want to do, art, music, writing, and so on has been replaced by a soulless robot that feeds on our own creations while billionaires get richer. Art is seen simply as another commodity that can be done for cheaper and cheaper, versus as one of the most important ways we connect as people.

Actual writers, people who actual write and think and consider each word, they rarely make much money on their writing. Given that so much of genre fiction has shifted to as self-published model, many writers stay in the negative.

It feels hard, on days like today, to feel like it’s worth it. But I think that’s why we have to keep writing, keep creating. We need real, human-created art more and more. It feels hard and heavy today. I want to keep writing but on says like to day, I kind of want to keep my writing to myself, because why does it matter.