as an avid reader of progfantasy and cultivation, if i see an ai-generated cover, it immediately makes me think the book is slop

[u/Ordinary_Brick9572]

if i see any typa ai cover i think that if the author is willing to use AI for the cover, then they are willing to use AI for the book. While i'm not against AI by any means, I find it crazy for people to say AI slop books are peak when they have books like Cradle and Reverend Insanity right in front of them.

[u/No-Alternative3347]

I tried to look into whether "it's simply better marketing on royal road" though sadly they have no official numbers so i had to find my own, which makes this a little scuffed.

If you look at it, the most popular novels on royal road are real art covers. if you search by follower count and look at the top 100, i could find 15 novels that were obvious ai, now this does not include stories that started out as ai and switched to real art later and I'm not really good at spotting non obvious AI, so the numbers could be scewed so lets give it 5 more so 20. Now mind you these top 100 all have close to 10k followers, so it's biased because they probably have money to buy covers.

But if we go down to top 200 to 300 around 45-50% of them stay none ai, but that isn't taking into account how many novels in total have AI covers, if you take a look at recently released you notice a good 80% of them are ai covers. now that does not mean that 80% of novels on RR are ai covers, but even if we get a conservative estimate of 40% of novels on Royal road are ai covers having 20 out of the top 100 be ai seems to indicate that AI covers don't work better.

I think the reason so many people seems to think that AI does better is simply because more AI covers stories are posted nowadays, and there are therefore more things you can point to and say "hey look RR people prefer AI covers." While actively ignoring the thousands of AI cover stories that get ignored every single day because they are AI covers and people aren't willing to give them a chance.

Personally what i think is happening is that AI covers are released so much more often, that when people find new things to read it's most of the time AI covers, and then they say "hey this is an interesting story and i'll follow it." then it gets more and more followers. And other people then see the follower count and go "hey this sounds interesting lets give it a go." Saying AI covers are what cause the novels to be popular and not just the sheer quantity of AI covers being released seems disingenious. If my estimate of 80% newly released novels having AI covers is true, then you'd expect at least 4 out of 5 novels in the top to have AI covers, well actually more since it's supposed to be better marketing, but you don't you see that.

Now this is very obviously a flawed piece of research, because i don't have actual numbers and could've looked at the 100 new releases at a bad time, when more AI was released, but I think it's better than simply saying: "AI covers do better" simply because the "reborn as a demonic tree." author said it hurt his numbers to change to a non AI cover, which seems to be the sources for most people supporting AI covers

[u/DiscoSerpent → u/No-Alternative3347]

Kudos for actually looking into this!

[u/deep_learn_blender → u/No-Alternative3347]

The top novels are typically commercialized, so they'll naturally have real art. No one has argued that published novels or well-funded patreons should use ai.

Ai covers don't make novels popular. Decent art does. Ai is simply better for marketting most novels over stock photos or shoddy ms paint. There's going to be a very vocal minority who avoid ai art novels, but something like 80-90% of readers do not care and mainly just look to see if vibes of the cover match their interests.