This is part one in an ongoing series about AI, its role in generating content, and other related topics.

A bunch of sites are adding AI detectors to help you determine if someone is posting AI-generated content and trying to pass it off as their own work. In theory, it’s a cool idea. In actuality, it’s just another AI doing its best to guess if what you’ve posted is AI or not. If you’re trying to avoid using AI because of environmental concerns, running those detectors is just using AI.

Out of curiosity, I went ahead and put my latest book cover through AI detectors to see what would happen. I’ve tried it before on my writing and gotten mixed results, which I’ll post about on another occasion. Today, I’m just going to focus on art and images. Here’s the book cover in question, which is for a short story about a prison psychologist named Wendy:

I made this by layering three images over each other in Photoshop, using different layer blending modes. The three images are stock photos I purchased licenses for from Deposit Photos. Here they are in their raw form:

This kind of reminds me of a music visualizer or something, but I think it was described as “pixel glitch” — whatever.

Supposedly, this guy is a hacker. I guess we can tell from the binary numbers and pixel-glitch overlay.

The text is more complicated — a mix of fonts, including Avenir, Bebas, and Hacked, and the typerwriter font I think is Dippa? Then I do some magical Photoshop-fuckery on them I learned way back in animation school, but if you ask an AI detector, what do you get?

Ah, well… fuck. And as you can see, I’ve even moved the text around and nothing else has changed about the image — a feat which an AI could never quite pull off.

“The image features strong digital effects” – no shit, Sherlock, it’s Photoshop – “with prominent glitch-like pixelation and a grid overlay, giving it a distinctly cybernetic, computer-generated aesthetic. The numerical binary code (0s and 1s) floating throughout the image enhances this digital, AI-generated vibe, particularly fitting the cyber noir theme.”

Particularly fitting the cyber noir theme……. as if a human being with a background in advertising and commercial art created a book cover for a cyber noir book. Maybe.

“These fonts have a modern digital typeface look with added noise and distortion typical of AI or digitally enhanced graphics, rather than human-made design imperfections. This artificial light effect results in a slightly surreal look, consistent with AI generation or heavy digital manipulation. The saturation and brightness levels are pushed high to create an otherworldly effect, typical of AI art aiming for cyberpunk or futuristic themes. Overall, the image displays strong signs of AI-generated characteristics in the digital texturing, glitch effects, and light manipulation that give it a highly stylized, computer-generated atmosphere.”

In actuality, the effect is achieved by layering the font (I chose Hacked for this example) in different colors, with grid and distressed textures, spot-erasing bits of each texture, using different layer blending modes to bring out and push back textures and make the color more interesting, horizontal slices moved left and right slightly, a light glow added in layer styles, and finished off with custom Photoshop brushes of pixels, blocks, and scan lines.

In this case, I added another layer of the font with a gradient stroke in order to make it more readable at scale, since this was a graphic I made for a Patreon collection cover.

But as you can see, I am 99.67% full of shit.

Or maybe I’m only 11% full of shit?

Wait — is it 11% AI or 11% real? Am I 89% full of shit or 11% full of shit? Well, two of them agree on the number 11 so perhaps 11% of one of the stock photos I bought was AI-enhanced somehow.

Wait, wait, wait. Now I’m 0% full of shit? Then again, one night a while back I fed this one of my oil paintings and it told me it was AI. I can’t remember which one to recreate the result, but I know it obviously wasn’t true because uhm —

There are a million videos and photos of me painting said oil paintings. The paintings themselves are no longer in my possession — they’ve either been sold or are in my agent’s possession until they do sell, so I can’t hold them up with today’s newspaper like they’re little hostages.

This kind of shit in particular really pisses me off. I’ve had to work harder than anyone really knows to be able to do the things I do. I had a hypoxic brain injury and spinal injury during a surgery which left my arms temporarily paralyzed and obliterated my personality. It was bad enough that generative AI came along, and that hundreds and thousands of copies of my artwork and non-fiction articles I’d written about art were fed into it to make it what it is now. Now they’ve made new AI that you can use to scan what I’m saying to you right now and decide if you trust me or not, after all the years I worked to be able to even push buttons on a fucking keyboard, let alone lift up a paint brush and paint for sometimes sixteen hours a day.

In a weird way, it reminds me of the conman at the center of the plot of Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches. There are Sneetches with stars on their bellies, and Sneetches who do not have stars. Whether it is cool to have stars or not goes back and forth, but a conman with a star-on machine arrives in town to put stars on bellies, and then he invents a star-off machine to remove them. By the climax of the book, the Sneetches are going back and forth from one machine to the other to get their stars on or off, because they want to be whichever one is cool. At the end, they don’t remember how they started.

You can use the AI or the AI-off machine. At the end of the day, you won’t know what’s real or who to trust, and I honestly think that’s the whole point.

PS: I tried to use Substack’s built-in Pangram scanner to scan my text and see if it was AI-generated, too. Pangram gave me double middle fingers. I wonder if it knew I was roasting it?

Well, fuck you Pangram and all your weird, star-off machine cousins.

PPS: Pangram uses the same data set structure as all the other AI’s, which are basically EATING ANTIQUE BOOKS to avoid ingesting their own slop.