All those in creative areas start by being inspired by others in their particular discipline, and their early work often replicates those they admire. The essence of AI is doing precisely that, minus the emotional dimension. It absorbs entire histories of existing work, and when given the necessary 'prompt,' it will produce something along the lines of whoever the prompter has suggested. The AI will then, in seconds, spew out as many variations of the prompt fed as you want.
Long before AI and the digital world, this kind of thing has been happening for decades in the book cover landscape. As a 19-year-old desperate to design an actual book cover, I visited bookshops to check out the new arrivals, zoom in on bad ones, read the essence of the story, and later, at home at the kitchen table would create my reimaginings of those covers I disliked, all hand made back in those analogue days of the 1960s. The results of my efforts were added to a little A4 folder with others, hoping to show them to anyone in publishing who would afford me their time.
Today, young and not-so-young graduates show their reimagined covers on Instagram for all to see and hopefully to garner a commission. Hundreds of established cover designers post all their published covers online, often including outtakes. There are also an increasing number of online directories like I Need a Book Cover with portfolios of cover designers around the globe. And there are oddballs like me who share their interest in the discipline. With all this work displayed 24/7, it's no wonder there is a plethora of inspiration, imitation, and downright copying on an industrial scale that has nothing to do with AI but flesh-and-blood designers behaving like the thing they fear. The two covers shown took my attention to the above topic. The notable US designer Peter Mendelsund published his unused 2008 cover design (on the left) when the book's title changed to 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'. (On the right) In 2017, this cover appeared in the UK as published by Vintage. Coincidence or inspiration? This similarity is one example of thousands of covers these days that closely follow others to become a 'trend.' The downside of this open-source sharing is that every cover designer has to have a variety of trends in their armour. Consequently, the once-recognised 'individuality' of a designer has virtually disappeared.