Several bookstores withdraw a Planeta work from sale for creating its cover with artificial intelligence

A new controversy related to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) programs to create images is shaking the world of illustration these days and, incidentally, this time also the publishing sector. This time on the cover of the Spanish edition of the historical novel Joan of Arc, by Katherine J. Chen, published by Destino, the Planeta group's label. Various bookstores They have decided to remove the book from their shelves and return them to the publisher after last Wednesday the illustrator David López, who has worked for Marvel and DC as a comic artist for the series Captain Marvel either catwoman, published on the social network X (formerly Twitter) a message with eight points that supposedly demonstrate that the cover had been designed by an AI. He pointed out, for example, extreme perfectionism and anatomical inconsistencies. Contacted by this newspaper, Planeta assures that the cover “was made by a team designer using common design programs that have long contained AI utilities.”

“There is a lot of evidence. All the images made by AI look quite similar, with a photorealistic drawing with nondescript people who respond to strict canons of beauty: small noses, high cheekbones, impossibly long necks, and the eyes are from two different people. Also the AI ​​has a lot of problems drawing parts where the hair interacts with the ears. The face has a very perfect finish, but the background is blurred and there is no trace of any brush stroke,” David López explains to this newspaper. “This seems unfair and pernicious to artists who are already being crushed, we are not going to accept it,” Alberto Haj-Saleh, bookseller at Casa Tomada, one of those who have joined the cause along with La Llama Store, Nuevo Nueve, LES Editorial, Fandogamia or La Imprenta, among others.

Beyond the aesthetic appreciation of the cover, what the illustrators denounce is the publisher's decision to dispense with a illustrator to do it with a machine. “You harm the work of a lot of professionals, you make them precarious, you underestimate them because you are preferring a solution that has no coherence compared to the work of a professional,” says Carla Berrocal, illustrator and former president of the Professional Association of Illustrators of Madrid (APIM). ), which invites other artists not to work with the label until they commit to abandoning that practice.

The cartoonist and animator David Rubín, nominated four times for the Eisner Award, raises the same argument: “This is a way to help each other in the sector and to exert pressure so that this does not happen, or that at least it has a price for the publisher that decides to pull AI”, he wrote on his X account, celebrating the bookstores' decision to withdraw the book.

“That one of the publishers with the highest turnover decides to have its covers made by an AI is not ethical,” adds Berrocal. López adds on this matter: “I can understand it when a person self-publishes to publish it on Amazon, I understand to a certain extent that they use that method, but a publisher like this, with a powerful launch, why do you do that?”

The editorial area of ​​Planeta assures, however, that its art and design department is made up of more than 30 professionals: “Behind all our covers there is and will always be a human team of designers and editors who work and supervise the ideas, conception and execution of the covers.”

The other big problem that professionals in the sector point out is that the images generated by AI are fed by the work of illustrators. Through a crawler (algorithm used to analyze the code of a website in search of information), artificial intelligence collects all the information published on the Internet, from the images that an illustrator uploads to his page to promote himself to public domain products. “In addition to precariousness, we have a legal problem; these images have no copyright. Many people are going to have to leave the profession,” says López. Berrocal adds that it is “plagiarism” because he does not have the consent of the authors and their work is copied to obtain financial gain.

As for the booksellers, they clarify that they are not against AI and understand that it is a tool like Photoshop was in its day. Their main problem, they say, is the unpaid use of artists' work: “Artificial intelligence has been nourished by the work of thousands of illustrators to generate imperfect pastiches without paying copyrights. Will we be able to detect books writings by ChatGPT? No, in the same way that we would not be able to detect a plagiarized novel… but if it became public that it was plagiarized, we would remove it from our store,” declares Kike García, from La Llama Store. The Destiny edition of Joan of Arc It does not have the author of the cover on the first page as the publisher usually does, denounces Haj-Saleh: “It is difficult to identify cover by cover, but if the alarms go off and it does not have an accredited author, we will not keep the book.”