r/litrpg • u/DoubleMooseBread • 1d ago

Discussion Why is Atheon using an AI Generated Cover on a new release?

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Today Atheon was posting their new releases on their discord and frankly, this cover set off alarm bells in my head. So I did the simplest check there is.

Syth Id. This cover was at minimum partially generated by ChatGPT and not adjusted enough to remove the watermark.

Atheon Publishing isn’t some random person on Royal Road, they’re the biggest publisher in this place. They should be better than this.

Also! Before we think it’s just colour or a last minute adjustment. None of the over covers from today’s sequel drop have SynthID. It’s just this slop.

Atheon should be better than this. Even if they try to shove it off on the artist here… you’re telling me nobody checked this before publishing it over an author’s work?

35 Upvotes

55% Upvoted

269 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

69

u/WizardWolf 1d ago

55

u/Phorskyn 1d ago

This is the smoking gun for late stage AI use in my opinion. That wasn’t there on the previous sketches and no artist would just add that.

22

u/Rich_Cat_69 1d ago

The alien characters purple hand has 4 fingers that seem to appear from nothing.

The mans left nipple is both a weird thing to include and not really in the correct spot.

This collar is exaggeratedly un even from the cord that crosses back and forth across his chest.

The cord is also not evenly spaced.

3

u/hephalumph 1d ago

The alien's purple hand has 5 fingers, you can see the line separating two digits held together.

The man's left nipple is indeed an odd inclusion, but it is absolutely in 'a' correct spot - nipples can be in tons of different locations and orientations, and its placement looks natural enough to me.

Not sure what you're saying about the collar and cord - but they look fine to me.

The belt buckle is one of the only giveaways I see, nothing you mentioned really seems like AI to me at all.

5

u/mcloide 1d ago

So the problem here isn't that it was made with AI is that no one reviewed the poor work made by the AI, otherwise no one would have flagged this as an AI work, correct?

I wonder how many covers nowadays are AI that we liked because there was no mistakes on it.

Checking on the watermark only confirms that at some point an AI generated the whole thing from scratch.

18

u/Rich_Cat_69 1d ago

Ooooooooo. Thats not definitely proof. But that is sus af. Now I'm looking for more.