“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a classic saying that I mostly disagree with. You can’t help but judge a book by its cover, and more often than not, the cover is accurately representative of the vibe of the book. I unabashedly judge books by their covers, and my initial thoughts are almost always correct. Covers that I am aesthetically drawn to inevitably have a story inside that I am aesthetically drawn to. It’s actually a good rule of thumb to judge a book by its cover. If you think the cover of a book looks appealing, you’ll usually like the contents of the book as well.

But judging books by their covers doesn’t work 100% of the time. There are some books that have mediocre covers but are great novels. Likewise, there are great covers that have terrible stories inside. Part of the discrepancy between book and cover is that authors usually don’t create the cover art themselves. In traditional publishing, the author often doesn’t have any say about what the cover will be. If the publisher hires good artists, this could still work out, but there are plenty of authors who are upset by their covers, and believe that led to reduced sales of their books.

In the world of self-publishing, an author can create their own cover, or hire an artist to create a cover for them. The book itself may be great, but if the author has poor design skills, they won’t be able to make cover art that matches the quality of their writing. Or if the indie author is financially limited from hiring a talented artist who can create cover art that matches what they envision, that could result in mediocre or even poor cover art for an otherwise great book.

AI art could be a leveling tool for independent writers to create professional-grade cover art for little to no money. While I sympathize with graphic design artists who may lose work from this, a book is not really their work of art. The book is the artwork of the writer. So the cover art should come from the writer directly, to more fully capture their vision.

AI can enable writers to create artwork of anything they can imagine. Therefore, an AI cover created by a human author should be the most accurate reflection of the quality of the book, because when you can create any art you can imagine with AI, the cover is a direct reflection of the author’s imagination. If an author fails to imagine a good cover, it’s hard to imagine them imagining a good story and characters either. If you lack aesthetic taste for good cover art, you likely lack aesthetic taste for good literature as well. So we should judge books by their covers, and authors should use AI to create aesthetically appealing cover art.