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5:30 pm, November 18th, 2025 - 33 comments
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Daily review is also your post.
This provides Standardistas the opportunity to review events of the day.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Don’t forget to be kind to each other …
Bit of an informal poll. When you look at the cat book cover in this RNZ piece, what kind of reaction do you have?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/books/top-writers-ruled-out-of-nz-book-awards-due-to-ai-covers
Terribly fake and the title is non-catchy and boring (i.e., like a keyword for a Google search); I wouldn’t pick up the book for a quick browse/inspection.
so an intellectual reaction rather than emotional or visceral one?
It didn’t evoke much of an emotional response with me, nor did it arouse curiosity, which is an important ‘hook’, only a ‘non-interesting’. In fact, I had not much of a reaction at all aka ‘meh’.
"..what kind of reaction do you have?"
Meh.
Something about a cat that has human teeth and….zzz.
More exciting is RNZ's Feral. That's got cats in it. BIG cats.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/in-depth-special-projects/story/2019012748/feral-the-advance-of-destructive-wild-cats-across-new-zealand-s-native-heartland
Trigger warning, most of the cats are unliving (or whatever the new term for shuffled off their mortal coil is).
does that mean you don't have much reaction to the image on the book cover?
I'm not a fan of cats so I suppose it is an emotional response. But one of 'this is not for me'.
The artificiality of the image registers but it is art. Art can do whatever it wants to do. The purpose of art is to provoke a response.
Art used for commerce, that's a more trivial thing.
I wrote an explanation below. It's not about like/dislike, or provocation, it's that AI images can trigger a particular kind of response in (apparently some) humans that is new, beyond human art.
I fully expect the social media giant sociopaths to use this to further manipulate the population. Although this little experiment suggests that only parts of the population are affected (or maybe some of us are more aware?).
I feel mildly unsettled / uneasy / uncomfortable, which is probably as intended.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/total-pixel-space-jacob-adler-a-i-film-festival-2662774
It's an AI cheap-out by people too mean to pay a human to do the cover illustration.
The cat with teeth like human teeth sort of horrified me. But it would probably not deter me from looking at the book or buying it as I would think that is had something to do with the book.
Even having a BFA I could not have 'told' that the images were AI generated. I do support the human artists working in publishing.
I think we can be a little precious though about methods of generating art and note that many artists use photo editing software, Canva, Adobe in some of the workups for their artworks.
If it is important that no AI or other helpful programmes be used in the production of the covers for books then the awards should say so.
There is an interesting discussion book covers and AI on this Reddit thread with some authors/book cover artists contributing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish/comments/151nzag/are_ai_book_covers_a_thing_now/
I would be pretty pissed if I were the author, and the publisher did that to my work and in doing so also ruled me out of the premier local literary award.
yep. Worse, people like me wouldn't buy the book because of the visceral reaction against the image. I don't want that on the bedside table.
Hmm. I wouldn't buy, read, or even pick up that book – based on the cover image. Because it looks like a horror title – and I really don't enjoy those.
It wouldn't have made any difference to me whether it was AI generated, or commissioned from a human artist by the publisher. It's the image content that I dislike.
While I understand where the Ockham judging panel is coming from – in wanting to protect the print world from AI – that is absolutely not their job (in this award – Fiction) to judge the book by it's cover. It's the content they should be evaluating.
There are other awards where the illustrations (including the cover) are highly relevant (Illustrated nonfiction, for example) – but this is not one of them.
And, unless this specific cover image restriction is listed in the award criteria – well before the books were published and submitted – I don't think they are acting in either the spirit or the letter of the Award.
In addition, the criteria specifies that the "content" must not be AI generated. It would be very hard to argue that the cover of a fiction book (with no internal illustrations) is part of the content. It is not created by the author, and the author usually has zero input over the image used (there are plenty of cases where authors express their frustration over a cover image which doesn't reflect their story in any meaningful way, or is even misleading). In many cases, the cover illustrator will not be a Kiwi (for overseas publications by NZ authors, it would be highly unlikely that the cover illustrator was a Kiwi) – and this is not considered a bar to the book being considered for the NZ fiction award (i.e. the nationality of the illustrator doesn't matter).
https://www.nzbookawards.nz/Images/Assets/50102/1/Ockham%20NZ%20Book%20Awards%20Call%20for%20Entries%20Pack%202026_FINAL.pdf
Based on this, I doubt that any publisher would have considered that AI cover images (alone) would be a bar. And, I think that, if the judges are excluding fiction works, with no internal illustrations, based on the cover image alone – they are on very shaky grounds.
Does it matter? They're book covers and a lot of people will buy them on Kindle anyway.
Not sure when I last bought a real book. Yes I am. I was in Melbourne on a rare trip outside NZ and bought a rather expensive (for me) copy of Iain M Banks' The Culture – The Drawings as a birthday treat.
Ah, the spectacularly inventive Iain M. Banks – my favourite Culture novel (haven't read them all) is Excession – how Minds respond to an Outside Context Problem.
its in my top 3 along with "Consider Phlebas" and "The Algebraist"
i am enjoying this fanfic too… by a talented writer
https://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/index.html
There is a nice comparison of child poverty levels (and changes) between nations in the link below.
https://wapo.st/4r2RG3d
Labour is ending the two child limit in its next budget
https://www.bigissue.com/opinion/two-child-benefit-cap-suffering-children/
the reason I asked about people's reactions is I was talking with someone in twitter about the image and we both had a negative visceral reaction to the image. For me it kicks in before any ideas about the image or its use. I was curious how many people have similar reactions and those that don't. I wouldn't buy the book on the basis of that picture.
What bloody stupid thing to ban someone for, I find the cover just a kinda cool, know idea if it fits the context of the book , but fuck intellectuals can be petty it would seem.
no-one's been banned. That particular award is ruling out AI. If you are ok with AI art, are you ok with AI novels? Why bother having writers and visual artists at all?
The reasons are explained in the RNZ piece, but generally AI doesn’t make things like humans do and this is going to cause varying problems in addition to the copyright and worker rights issues. Some humans have a visceral response of disgust or aversion, it’s not the content of the image, it’s the way it is constructed. If someone had hand drawn that cat image, I might have not liked it, by hey ho, whatever. It’s not about like/dislike, it’s about how AI impacts on human experience.
Perfectly fine to ban AI illustration in a category which is judging illustrated works (although, it begs the question, does the AI have a chance of winning?)
But, why ban AI covers for something which is intended to be judged on the text. Was the cover image a judging factor for past fiction winners (Damien Wilkins, Emily Perkins, Catherine Chidgey)? It seems highly unlikely that an outstanding fiction title would miss out on the award to one which was less so, because of a less appealing cover image.
it's explained in the RNZ article. Why bother having books at all? Just print out a PDF if the text is the only thing that matters.
The opinion of one judge (who is, let's be clear, a judge in a book design award (not the Fiction award) is quoted in the RNZ article. And even she is clear that it's a controversial call.
The Guardian quotes Elizabeth Smither (who has also been an Ockham judge)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/18/authors-dumped-from-new-zealands-top-book-prize-after-ai-used-in-cover-designs
I wonder who in the judging panel is driving this? Nicola Legat doesn't exactly come across as the strongest supporter.
And, to answer your question – the publisher has to supply the books to the judging panel – it's a heck of a lot cheaper to provide print copies (which they're selling to the public in any case), than to print out a pdf.
That’s a crappy answer [to Weka’s question] and shows that you haven’t read the Entries Pack (final version) that you linked to @ 1.6.1.1.
I have indeed read the entries requirements.
Weka asked the (rhetorical) question about why bother to supply a published book, rather than a PDF. It is rhetorical, since the entry criteria specify that printed books must be supplied. I could have answered in practical terms "because printed books must be supplied to be considered for the print materials awards" – but that is a circular argument.
Do you have anything to contribute to the discussion about whether AI covers should bar fiction titles from being considered for a major literary award?
You say that you’ve read the Entries Pack but you clearly have not fully read & understood them – they were actually quite easy to understand, which begs the question how you produce such a crap answer, twice now!?
In addition, your prior cost comparison was evidence/fact-free.
Please give it a miss instead of talking out of your arse.
For the record, on balance, I support this decision by the New Zealand Book Awards Trust, which would not have been made lightly given the predictable implications for some of the submitted entries.
Do you have any evidence for your contention that the decision would not have been made lightly?
From the Guardian article you quoted and linked to @5.1.1.1.1.
Hope this evidence helps – not sure how you missed it tbh 🙂
The economies of scale of offset printing vs print on demand are well known.
For small, limited print runs POD is cheaper. Once you're in commercial scale publication quantities, offset is going to be cheaper.
https://books.forbes.com/blog/print-on-demand-versus-offset-printing/
For me, it was the content of the image that was mildly unsettling. As far as I can tell, the way the image was constructed didn't add to that reaction.
Some comments here brought to mind the art of Bill Hammond. I find his fantastic bird-human hybrids mildly unsettling – an individual (subjective) reaction.
https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/bill-hammond-jingle-jangle-morning
@weka, reading is mostly for entertainment,so d I es it natter where it comes from? Maybe publishers could come up with an ai insignia to clarify whether the author is ai or not.
And I'm of the opinion that if someone can create an ai that can create art that's art ?
In this case, there is absolutely no question about the authors being AI. They are highly respected figures in the NZ literary scene. [NB: there absolutely are completely AI generated books – I deal with them all the time in my IRL job – but that's not what we're looking at here.]
The only AI element is the covers. And even then – there is a spectrum. Graphic designers use IT – sliding into AI tools all the time – where is the boundary? And who judges?
I pity the Fiction prize winner this year – it's going to be tainted.