I publish public domain books. And the fact is, I put in a fair amount of work on each book.
True, there are some people who just copy and paste books from Project Gutenberg, slap them together in "MEGApack" collections, and call themselves publishers. With a very few exceptions, that is not what I do.
I find books that are not yet on Gutenberg, and more often than not that have never been turned into properly-formed (and proofread) ebooks at all, anywhere. I take the OCR text generated from page images, clean it up, proofread it, and convert it into proper ebook format. And that's after I do the research necessary to ensure the book is in the public domain.
Some of the books I post are lucky to sell ten copies. A few books have never sold one.
Thus, not only am I a one-man operation, but I truly cannot afford to invest much (beyond my own time) into any given book.
Up to last summer, the covers I put together were kludged together in the GIMP from public domain artwork, public domain photographs, or freely-usable art or pictures, with additional manipulation from me to get them to kinda-sorta look like the books they graced were in the genres they were in.
Then I bought a MidJourney subscription.
Even at the beginning, when the artwork was very abstract and sometimes quite horrifying, it was a superior alternative to manipulating public domain images of only vague relation to what the books contained. This was new artwork, looked, sometimes, really good --- the "horrifying" played into the Eerie October covers very well indeed --- and the more I learned to work with Midjourney, the more I can make artwork that looks distinct from any other book covers on the market.
So, to make this perfectly clear, I literally cannot afford to pay artists for new artwork for these book covers. Some books may only make ten dollars in a year. A few may not make any money. Even licensing old artwork is going to be too expensive (and too much of a pain to do, frankly, in terms of time investment finding an old piece of art, tracking down the artist or rights owner, and working out a license deal; again, I'm a one-man operation, so I cannot do that every week, for each new book I put out) for it to be practical on old public domain books.
Midjourney, on the other hand, allows me to generate literally hundreds of unique pieces of art per month, at a cost of about thirty dollars each month.
This robs nobody. I was never going to be able to buy the services of any artist to do this task, certainly not at the scale of a new cover every week. MidJourney improves my product, and hurts nobody.
What about the artists whose styles you steal? some will ask. I have several answers to that, from the general to my own personal rules.
First, you cannot steal somebody's style. Style is not legally protectable, any more than ideas can be copyrighted. You can only legally protect specific works of art with copyright. Doing something in the style of whomever is no more plagiarism than making a gangster movie with slick camera work, long tracking shots interspersed with time-fracturing editing and a fourth-wall breaking coda is "ripping off" Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Derivative, sure, but the specific work is the important thing. And if you make a movie derivative of Goodfellas, nobody is going to stop considering Goodfellas a masterpiece.
Second, there are a vast number of artists who are dead, from whom Midjourney takes cues. You can't steal work from the dead, they simply cannot create new work. (As an aside, you can get some very interesting results using Vincent van Gogh as a style reference when creating science fiction art.)
Third, at my personal level, while I do use living (or recently-deceased) artists as style references, my habit is to apply their styles to genres they never have done art for.
For example, an artist named Leonid Afremov passed away in 2019. When I was still on Twitter, I followed his official account, because his artwork was unique --- he did paintings using only a palette knife, no brushwork at all. They were generally exceedingly bright and colorful, and somewhat abstract representations of urban settings.
MidJourney for a while turned out things that looked like his style, but were almost totally abstract. Now it does the "colorful", but leaves aside the palette-knife style for more realistic figures and objects. I use him as a style reference for westerns (so far, only the new cover for William MacLeod Raine's Ironheart has been published, but more are coming, as I will probably use him for covers in a long series), because he never did such a setting, and the results, when they work, are extremely pleasing.
Is this stealing from him? Of course not. He's dead, and the art generated is unlike anything he ever actually made. Is it stealing from his studio, which continues to create paintings in his style? Just as much as the studio is stealing from the original, perhaps.
As with any new tool that makes something previously difficult easy, AI art generators will be abused. That's just human nature. But is it harming anyone? Once someone starts actively forging a living artist's work, in that case, yes.
But short of that? No. It's just another tool. How the tool is used is up to each user.
