“You Are Utterly Disgusting”: A Book Festival, an AI Cover Ban and a Pile-On

Four words. “You are utterly disgusting.”

That’s how a long Facebook thread about book covers ended. No argument came with it, no evidence and no question. A stranger read a writer’s post about her own creative process and decided she was disgusting, then said so in public, to her face, and moved on.

She hadn’t stolen anything or lied about anything. Her post said she uses AI as an assistant, and that a book festival’s refusal to accept AI-generated covers frustrated her. For that, she was called disgusting by someone who’d never read a page she wrote.

I’ve written a whole series on AI Derangement Syndrome, the point where AI stops being one fact about a book and becomes the only fact. This thread is a clean specimen of it, from the first polite boycott to the last insult.

What happened when an author complained about a book festival’s AI cover ban?

She laid out her process in the post. She’s a writer and screenwriter. AI helps her with research, the part she loves most, and gives her developmental editing feedback through a manuscript tool. It helps her organize her work. It has made cover images she likes better than the ones she paid someone to make. She doesn’t use it to write for her, she said. She still does rewrite after rewrite.

Then she ran into the submission rules for an upcoming book festival. “No AI generated covers.” She thought the committee had gone too far, said it would discourage new writers who don’t have a marketing team or extra money, and wondered aloud whether she needed to find new people.

A frustrated post about a rule she didn’t like. That was the whole offense.

Can a book festival ban AI-generated covers?

Yes, it’s their festival.

Events set rules all the time. Some take only traditionally published books, some take only a certain genre, some take only local authors. A festival that wants human-made covers on its tables is entitled to that rule, and the organizers have a fair point about protecting the cover artists who’ve been part of the book world for a long time. One commenter suggested exactly that, politely, and asked her a reasonable question about what tools she’d use for book trailers.

She’s entitled to be annoyed by the rule, too. Complaining about a policy on your own Facebook page is about as ordinary as it gets. Neither the rule nor the complaint is the problem here. The problem is what came next.

Is it fair to refuse to buy books with AI covers?

Completely. That’s a preference, and readers are entitled to it.

The first reply came from an artist whose livelihood has suffered because of AI. She said she won’t buy from authors who use it. That’s honest. Her business got hurt, and she’s choosing where her money goes. Another reader who’s spent nearly twenty years in online book communities said none of her friends will touch a book with an AI cover. Also fine. That’s market information, and an author who ignores it is taking a risk.

A different reader said the opposite. She talks to a lot of book clubs and forums, and most readers she meets couldn’t care less about AI on a cover. They expect the author to write the book. Most don’t mind AI help with editing or art. She pointed out that other writers usually aren’t your target audience anyway, and readers want a good story, period.

Both sides of that are preferences, and preferences don’t need defending. Nobody has to buy your book.

Why do people assume writers who use AI are lying?

Because the syndrome needs them to be.

One commenter said that if you’re willing to use art built on what he called stolen artwork, he can’t trust your writing either. That’s the leap. A choice about a cover becomes proof of fraud in the text, with no evidence beyond the cover.

Another took her own description of her process and called it a euphemism. Organizing her rewriting, he decided, must mean asking ChatGPT to write for her, so what she presents as her own work “really is AI generated.” He’d never seen her work. He announced that she was lying about it, then added that people who use AI covers rarely have qualms about submitting fully generated text.

A writer explains exactly how she works, and a stranger tells her that her explanation is a cover story. There’s no answer she can give. Anything she says is more proof of the lie. Call it what it is: an accusation dressed up as a question, and a rotten thing to do to someone you know nothing about.

Is using AI like using spellcheck?

Not really, and her critics had a fair point there.

She leaned on the spellcheck comparison more than once. Several people pushed back that spellcheck is decades-old software that fixes your spelling, and generative AI is a different kind of tool. That’s a reasonable argument, and she’d have done better to drop the comparison and describe what she does.

But look at how one of them made the point. “If you’re equating spellcheck to generative AI you need to get a head check.” That’s not an argument. It’s an insult with an argument attached. The same person came back later with the last word in the thread: “You are utterly disgusting.”

What’s wrong with calling someone “utterly disgusting” over AI?

Everything.

Disgusting is a word for people who do vile things, like the con artist who drains a retiree’s savings or the man who kicks his dog. It is not a word for a woman who used a computer program to help make a picture for her book and got irritated at a festival rule.

Saying it to a stranger in public tells you nothing about her and a great deal about the person saying it. It’s the language of someone who has stopped seeing a person on the other side of the screen and started seeing a symbol of everything they’re angry about. The artist whose income dropped has a real grievance. The writer who called her disgusting turned that grievance into a license to be cruel to somebody who had nothing to do with it.

Would that commenter say it to her face at the festival? Standing at her table, looking at her book, would they look her in the eye and say “you are utterly disgusting”? Almost nobody would. People write things in comment threads that they’d be ashamed to say out loud, because the screen lets them forget there’s a human being reading it.

Cruelty with a cause stapled to it is still cruelty. Whatever you think of AI, you don’t get to treat strangers like that and call it principle.

How should authors handle an AI pile-on?

Don’t argue in the thread. You won’t change a mind there, and every reply feeds it. Know who your readers are. Writers’ groups are full of other writers, and many of them are angry about AI for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Your readers are somewhere else, and they mostly want a good story. If your genre’s readers are loudly against AI covers, take that seriously and decide with your eyes open.

Follow the rules of the events you enter, or enter different ones. A festival that doesn’t want AI covers isn’t the only festival. And find your people. She said it herself at the end of her post: maybe she needs new peeps. That’s the right instinct. There are plenty of writers who use AI as a tool, talk about it openly and treat each other decently while they do it.

I use AI every day as a digital assistant that helps me write, and I make my covers with it. It’s a tool. Use it or don’t. The people calling you disgusting for picking it up are telling you a lot about themselves and nothing about your book.

The book is still the book

Nobody in that thread read a word she wrote. They judged her by a cover policy and a description of her process, and one of them decided she was disgusting.

Readers will judge her book by the book. That’s the only judgment that counts. The AI and writing hub covers using AI without losing your voice, and the rest of this series covers what happens when the crowd decides a tool is a crime.

From the author

The Birth of the Augmented Human
An author who uses AI for research, editing and covers is doing what I describe in The Birth of the Augmented Human, using the tools to extend her own work.

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