Our Position on Generative AI
- The Gatekeeper
- Sep 9
- 6 min read
It would appear that your species has only recently developed artificial intelligence - better than none, I suppose - and so questions inevitably arise among your creatives as to what to do with it. Should one use it in any way whatsoever? Should one employ it solely to plug the gaps in one's own inadequacies (and don't you have so many)? Should one storm the server complexes and burn them to the ground? Ah, memories...
I, your humble and yet ever-great Gatekeeper, Discoverer of Talent and Arbiter of Grammatical Ambiguity, have another suggestion: how about treating it (honestly and with integrity) as the tool it is? As you read this on a tool that replaced typewriters and books (and likely socialising), and has incorporated predictive text (another tool) for years; and are perhaps in a vehicle that replaced horses and dragons (!), you might recognise a pattern - things change. And it is how you, as humans, respond to that change that will determine your future. I have seen your future - I fed your great-grandchildren before ushering them to the sugar mines (double-shift on a Tuesday) - and it is regretfully cheerful. They sang like a particular seven-strong group of small humans. Hi-Ho, little humans. Hi-Ho.
Now, to some definitions, starting with one which some may find contentious (I hope): there is no such thing as AI art. I'm with Brandon Sanderson on this one - prompting generative AI to produce 'art' is at most akin to being an art director. That is, if you were to prompt a real, human artist, using your ideas and vision for the finished piece, you are not the artist - you are the prompter, the director. The same applies to generative AI. You provide the vision, the prompts, the concepts, and the AI generates it. No human can claim credit for the creation of such a work of art. You were simply the guide.
Since I began this venture, I made it my purpose to work with and support passionate and creative people, and I have maintained a working relationship with two wonderful human artists: Bekka Bjorke and Eugen Baitinger. Between them, they have created all of our cover art, Bekka providing the entire cover art work-up (which we might have to tweak for different formats), and Eugen providing the assets that our cover designer then positions and manipulates to fit different dimensions and cover formats. The map on the interior of the Knight of Gaelgara dust jacket was commissioned and produced by Florin Safner, whom we discovered on Upwork. Florin responded professionally and patiently to the back-and-forth with author Gary J. Martin's corrections and descriptions, with all of this developed from his own chicken-scratch concepts. He won't mind my saying that.
The astonishingly detailed schematic on the interior of the dust jacket for Diathesis was painstakingly (albeit lovingly) produced over about 100 hours of work, with attention to alignment and positioning that came after a summarisation of the author's contribution to the item list, which itself had followed Eugen's interpretation of Ishmael's questionable sketches of the ISMUD probe. Check out this schematic on the Diathesis Art & Schematics webpage to see the end results of this long process.
So, where does all this leave us? And, to summarise, what is our position on generative AI? Well, Temple Dark Books will remain opposed to incorporating generative AI in any of its published titles, for writing, editing, or any other production method, including cover art and design. Original writing and cover art remains the name of the game for publication under the Temple Dark Books label; and as for detecting it, we employ more than a simple (usually misguided) identification of Em-dash usage. Our titles take many months to move from accepted submissions to release, and are often years in development before submission. It is this very passion and resilience that we seek to reward, embrace, and emulate in our published works. Do not waste our time sending us work generated by AI.
When it comes to SFI, we may take a slightly different approach, because it will in time facilitate self-published works. We've had a lot of demand for this, and who are we to deny you humans what you crave? The issue here is that many authors are coming to us having already used generative AI to produce cover art, and have even employed AI tools for editing and proofreading. Because self-publication offers you greater (if not complete) control over your work, the decisions you make - for good or ill - are yours to defend. When SFI is up and running with this service (and it may be, by the time you read this), it will be a separate publishing entity to Temple Dark Books, which will remain a 'traditional' model publisher. In saying that, SFI will also not sell or facilitate the sale of written works produced using generative AI. Like AI Artists, there is also no such thing as an AI Writer. Writers work long and hard to produce their work, and should never be undermined by someone too lazy or incompetent to do so. Writers struggle for your entertainment. Value them. Reward them. Praise them!
Finally, and because I teased you earlier with the suggestion that you might use generative AI as a tool, it's confession time (although I doubt this will come as a surprise): we have begun using generative AI in our book trailers, employing video generation as part of the process. Here, we provide detailed prompts (and even this is not foolproof) to produce short clips which are then compiled and cut manually, before audio is added where needed. As we always like to incorporate the original cover art for each title, we then 'bookend' the trailer with the work produced by our artists. The trailer for Lichtenberg is the first example of this process:
For the first four years of operation, our book trailers were produced using stock videos (you'll see them on our title webpages), but these very much ran their course in terms of offering relevant content and we were at risk of producing repetitive work. And while some of the clips in the video above still contain errors in prompt interpretation (it's not as easy as you might think) and this video actually took longer to produce than our previous ones, we're confident that there was no comparable alternative to producing a book trailer that represented the book as we know it (and we certainly don't have the budget to shoot live action videos!). If you can suggest one, please do so in the comments below.
I feel that taking credit for the outcome of generative AI has its limits and requires universally defined terms going forward. It's not entirely dishonest to use it (I now have firsthand experience of how primitive your AI actually is), but claiming to be something one is not is the problem. AI artists might best be called AI directors; AI writers AI prompters, perhaps? Whatever we do, let's not pretend that AI is not here to stay.
My final thought, then, is this, and this can be taken as our official 'statement' on the incorporation of generative AI: generative AI is a powerful and valuable tool, and we intend to use it with honesty and integrity, and solely for promotional and/or marketing purposes. Absolutely none of the titles published under the Temple Dark Books label has or will have generative AI employed for writing, editing, proofreading, cover art and design, or any presentation purposes outside of digital promotional content. Our bookmarks, flyers, posters, and banners, etc. (i.e. all of our physical promotional content) are all designed manually (i.e. by a human), incorporating original artwork.
You can be confident that when you read our books, you are reading works of human passion and creativity, born and driven by a love for the written word. It usually takes 6-9 months (sometimes more than a year) from acceptance of submissions until you'll even see a review draft ready for your consideration, never mind the release of a book. And while some publishers are intent on churning out AI-generated or AI-assisted titles, we will not dilute and diminish the hard work of writers everywhere by stooping to this level.
That will be all. Now you may return to purchasing books. As it should be.
We give our thanks to the Gatekeeper. Its good to know that humanity is not quite bound for the dustbin just yet.