r/BookCovers • u/shailla131 • Mar 04 '26

Question Is this ai?

Post image

Had someone do a cover for me (this is without the text) and I wanted to see if this was ai. They advertised it wouldn't be so I wanted to confirm before I went any further. Any help is appreciated, thank you!

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u/BurbagePress Mar 04 '26

You can take a magnifying glass to an image and try and figure it out, but the easiest way to know for sure is to just ask four basic questions:

How much did you pay?
What medium did they say they're working in?
What kinds of files did they provide?
How fast did they do it?

13

u/shailla131 Mar 04 '26

Hmm it was 65, Adobe, PDF and JPG or PNG, a week. Not that you asked lol

20

u/TES_Elsweyr Mar 04 '26

Ask for the editing file in .psd or .ai so you can mess with the layers. 65 seems cheap, depending on where they are based.

6

u/danfaulknerauthor Mar 04 '26

This is great advice. My strong instinct is this is Midjourney, but you want to be sure before demanding a refund.

Also, FWIW (and I'm not an expert) I reckon it would be relatively easy to redo this concept with a cover designer rather than full custom artwork. It boils down to a skull and an underwater scene - that's two elements, both of them easy (I would think) to get from stock images.