A Creative Approach To Generative AI In Book Cover Design With James Helps

I really enjoyed this laid-back discussion around AI tools as part of the creative book cover design process with James Helps from Go On Write. We discuss how generative AI tools can help make more unique and interesting cover designs, and how designers can have a more imaginative time making them. This episode is supported by my Patreon community, who fund my future-focused thinking time. If you join the community, you get an extra solo Q&A show monthly, as well as behind-the-scenes videos on planning for the year ahead, AI and creative business, plus discounts, early access, and more. Join the community for the price of a coffee a month at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn James Helps is a book cover designer at GoOnWrite.com, offering pre-made covers and custom cover design. He also writes articles for authors about the impact of AI at his blog, HumbleNations. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes James' history with computers, AI, and artVarious tools for AI-generated images and the rise of text to videoMidjourney vs DALL-E and how being an artist makes Midjourney easier to use as you have the language to use itHow James uses Midjourney as part of his creative ideation process with a client and how it gives him more scope for imaginative designs, and how it takes more timeIs AI a threat to cover designers and/or authors? How our human creative drive and connection is our real differentiator. You can find James at GoOnWrite.com, HumbleNations.wordpress.com, or JamesHelps.co.uk. Transcript of Interview with James Helps Joanna: James is a book cover designer at GoOnWrite.com, offering pre-made covers and custom cover design. He also writes articles for authors about the impact of AI at his blog, HumbleNations, which we're talking about today. So welcome to the show, James. James: Hi there. Joanna: Hello. Tell us a bit more about your book cover design business and how you became interested in generative AI. James: I guess the first thing I'd probably say is I don't really like the word business. It's more that I make covers for people that I like. They come in and chat to me, and I'm just a designer that really enjoys doing covers. I guess when it comes down to the AI stuff, I got interested in that probably around two years ago when there was a lot of stuff in the air. There was like the DALL-E and Imagen that I was reading about quite a lot. I've always been sort of somebody who's looked at technology as a thing. In my history, I did a computer science degree back in the early 90s. As a kid, I was always interested in technology and design. So it's something that I always read about. So I knew AI was coming, but I didn't realize that it was coming that fast. It was actually a friend of mine who's another designer, Craig, who told me about Midjourney. For me, it wasn't completely perfect, but I felt, well, it's time to actually start looking at this and learning about it. So it's about two years, 18 months ago now, that I started playing around with it. Joanna: It's interesting though, you said back in the 90s that you did a computer science degree and that you knew AI was coming, but you didn't know it was coming that fast. Of course− People have been talking about AI since the 90s. So do you think it's all just sped up in the last couple of years, as you say? Because it feels like people think, oh, it's come out of nowhere, but of course, it hasn't, has it? James: No, I mean even in the 90s they were talking about neural networks and how machine learning was working. I think Google, at a certain point, scanned all the books, and all those books that were scanned were used for machine learning to do things, to understand the structure of text. So anybody who's used Google Translate, that's basically AI. I guess the thing that sort of surprised me, looking back on it now, is the fact that it happened just after the pandemic. That's sort of interesting. I've got a theory, which I've told the same theory to my friends, my more tech friends, and they said the same thing. They agreed with me. It's the fact that there was a certain point in the pandemic where everybody was putting money into Bitcoin, and Bitcoin was shooting up and up. So then everybody was trying to mine Bitcoin, and the technology that they needed was graphics card server farms. Then obviously, the pandemic finished, Bitcoin crashed, and there was all these sort of empty server farms, graphics card server farms, so they all became available. I think that was what actually sped up it all just happening at once. There was cheap computing power to actually start playing around with these things. Joanna: That is interesting. I have also heard that, that they need a lot of these types of computers. It is interesting, isn't it, how we need this hardware to make the software to make things like nice images, and of course...