Wish to create your own book cover? This AI website will help you have one

A horror story starring a little girl and a demonic shadow, with the ‘mythological’ filter applied

All of us - okay, almost all of us - have dreamt of publishing our own books some day. And it has been the subject of many an idle chat over tea, coffee or something stronger, as to what one would like one's book cover to look like. We thought we'd put our ideas to test using everybody's current favourite tool: Artificial Intelligence. We tried out the first result we saw, Gencraft.

The website - https://gencraft.com/, has three plans. The free one gets you 10 prompts a day, and the images come with a watermark. The starter plan at R199 per week gets you 25 prompts a day with no watermarks on the images, while the pro-pack at R499 gives you unlimited prompts. Apart from the prompts, Gencraft also lets you apply filters like realistic, Polaroid, cartoon, 3-D, mystical and mythological, along with dedicated themes for food, wedding, Halloween and Valentine's Day.

Images generated by Gencraft for a thriller story featuring an assassin chasing a chartered accountant across the country, with the ‘realistic' feature applied (left), and the ‘video game' feature. Pics Courtesy/Gencraft

We started with our basic objective in mind - to create a book cover for a thriller about a chartered accountant being chased across the country by a dreaded assassin. After a few seconds laden with curiosity, Gencraft threw up an image of a book cover bearing the face of a bespectacled man with chiseled facial features. While it wasn't exactly what we were expecting, we realised our expectations were too literal. Instead of one man chasing another with a gun in hand, the face of a single man in a suit and glasses conveyed just the right sense of mystery that one would want from a thriller. In other words, the AI was actually intelligent.

We applied the ‘videogame' filter to the same prompts and, again, were not disappointed. Gencraft threw up a pixilated image - a throwback to the videogames of yore - of a menacing looking man advancing with a long gun in his hand, towers on both sides.

We experimented with various prompts and filters: a horror story featuring a little girl and a demonic shadow, with mystical as well as mythological filters; five diverse men and women with the cosmic filter, and a surprisingly appealing money heist in India with the wedding filter. The experience took us back to when we did college projects on MS Word, with limited stock images to choose from, for the cover page. We couldn't help thinking how cool it would have been to have access to Gencraft back then!