It seems I slightly misconcepted Bruno‘s idea with the cover art. Having no cover art on the comp page (not the necessarily the games themselves), would detach the personal game selection from seeing pictures, only resorting to the game description. But yes, it has clearly pros and cons.
This cover art for Repeat the Ending was made in 30 minutes with a public-domain vector drawing and some powerpoint filters.
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I sort of wonder how much difference it would make if IFComp submissions without any cover could be given one that was just the title on a solid coloured background of an appropriate size. Having this kind of “default cover” might not make a great impression, but it would give those entries more of a presence in the list and maybe take some pressure off entrants feeling like they have to bung in something.
I also feel as though it’s worth mentioning that I had (I think) the most-voted-on games for the past two years running with fairly plain white-text-on-black covers. Both were submitted under pseudonyms, so strike me as roughly equivalent to entries by a new author. You absolutely can just slap some text into a PNG and call it a day if you want to: if the entry itself is attention-grabbing, word of mouth will do the rest.
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I broadly agree with this, but if there is no rule then there are no cheaters. Using someone else’s work as an image prompt is permitted. Grabbing a likely-infringing AI image from a stock website is permitted. Being able to turf out entries that fragrantly break a rule is a benefit, even if not every violation of that rule can be identified.
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Yeah. This would be pretty easy to generate (not that kind of generate) with, say, a simple script that calls imagemagick. This can also be done on the frontend with js and a canvas pretty simply.
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A few people have already said this, but there are still plenty of ways to get free cover art/cover art components without using genAI. I badly color-shifted and re-sized a (supposedly) AI-free clip art image for my cover art. It’s not good in my opinion, but it functions, took maybe 20 minutes to sift through options and edit one I liked, and cost no money. (FYI I have negative visual art skills and barely know how to use any tools, and it still took laughably little time)
It’s really a difference of 0-30 minutes worth of work, and doing it dispells most of the ethical concerns regarding genAI. The only people that banning genAI cover art would exclude are probably the people who specifically wanted to insert genAI into their entry anyway. I won’t detail my opinion on that can of worms here, but suffice it to say that my stance on it seems to be in line with the majority opinion here.
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Fully agreed! Tagging like it is done now is the minimum, I think. I am just not sure how a viable ruleset could go beyond that without creating edge cases everywhere for the honest authors.
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Also to be quite honest I do think you could probably avoid 99% of the risk of accidentally using AI-generated free clip art you got online with the simple expedient trick of ‘looking at it’
I mean. C’mon dude.
There’s no disclosure on this entry and the art seems to be a collage of several images, so I’m assuming this was not generated by the entrant and was instead taken from a clipart website, but, again. Look at it. This stuff makes me feel insane.
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I do have sympathy for people who accidentally use genAI images. I’ve definitely made the same kind of dumb mistakes due to being tired/not paying attention/glossing over some details. Assuming that’s what happened here and they weren’t trying to pass it off as human-made on purpose, I only feel bad for the author.
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If people are looking for good AI-free public domain images, Wikimedia Commons is a good resource. I think I’ve gotten something like 80% of the art assets for my games from Wikimedia.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art also has a massive online database of public domain images.
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We’ve had the cover art convo here before:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone post here that they’d like help with cover art. But as both Brian’s post above and this post by me said back then:
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Seconding Wikimedia Commons; I got the cover image for my first IF there.
Actually, here’s a rundown on how I’ve gone about cover/background art as someone with virtually zero skills in visual art:
- Wikimedia Commons image, unmodified
- My own cell phone snapshot taken on a walk in Chicago, unmodified (I might have cropped it, maybe. Incidentally, this is by far my most-played game.)
- Stock images from Pexels, uploaded prior to 2022 and with a scan of the creators’ profiles to get a feel for their creative processes, namely that they had them. For the cover art I cropped, applied a color filter, and added title text.
- All three of my Neo-Twiny entries this year used my own old photos with color filters applied.
I will add that I’ve never entered IFComp, but I don’t feel like any of these would have put me at a disadvantage, as a lot of entries seem to use similar approaches.
The time investment on these wasn’t “type in a prompt and get something spat out,” but it also wasn’t significant, and I enjoyed myself even if I wasn’t confident. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly but sincerely.
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I specifically made the new cover art as a response to that thread. I once had hand-drawn art for a cover, but I wanted to test the idea that an LLM ban would be “unfair” to people who, like me, can’t draw.
It doesn’t seem unfair to me in the least. I like the new cover, in fact.
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There was one thread where someone asked for feedback on their cover art and a member ended up making professional-level art for them completely unprompted:
So, yes, I’d say asking for help here is definitely an option!
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At the risk of posting in this thread—by choosing to post in this thread, how gauche of me—I’d also like to mention that (to me) one of the most visually striking pieces of cover art this year in IF Comp is the cover of You Cannot Speak on Mars, which is literally just a featureless red square.
I mean, forgive me if there’s a lot of hidden depths to that cover art’s production process, I was not there to witness its creation. But, in addition to the points people have raised already, I think that’s a good example case of thinking creatively about how to abstractly represent your IF Comp submission as an art piece that is easy to produce without needing a lot of technical skill or turning to the grotesquerie of gen-AI slop images.
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I do wonder if part of the issue is signposting.
There is clearly an appetite for creating IF with AI, even if there is not the same appetite for playing it. It would not surprise me if, somewhere on the internet, someone had set up a competition specifically about this, that had a rubric that actually judged the parts a human might reasonably be able to do creatively without recourse to breaking open an external AI system.
If going down the path of further restriction/banning AI from IFComp, is it possible that advising of ways to find a competition where such entrants were more likely to find their happiness, would reduce the amount of people trying to post non-cynical corner cases (of whatever boundary got set)? Even some terms to look up in a search engine would be better than nothing.
(Disclaimer: I basically missed the IFComp because I’m in the middle of a beta test on someone else’s complex visual novel that’s getting commercially released in a few months. As such, I would prefer not to venture an opinion of AI in IFComp that is probably out-of-date in some way - except to say that using the survey is probably a good idea, for all opinions positive, negative and nuanced, be they related to AI or any other element of the competition).
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just think: it takes more time to read this thread than it took to generate the entirety of the ai content in the comp, probably
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Here are some past discussions of the idea of an AI-focused IF competition:
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Lock it. These were my personal thoughts. As a board member I would likely side with a ban, but be fine if someone promoted a separate AI allowed competition to “do whatever you want”.
Lock the topic.
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One of my crankier opinions is that creating things with gen-AI is a legitimate form of entertainment for the creator, just not for anyone else. It’s great fun to imagine an idea and see gen-AI bring it to life, you just shouldn’t expect anyone else to care.
AI Dungeon is a great example of this, but really the main audience for the many “AI-assisted novel writing” tools is the people having fun using them, not the mostly-nonexistent readers who might consume the end product.
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