The book cover for M.V. Prindle’s Bob the Wizardshows a coiffed man in sunglasses, smoke dancing from his mouth as a gray, ominous sky swirls behind him. A small fairy-like creature flutters nearby, and the folds and shadows of Bob’s jacket and beard fade into one while a bright green key hangs around his neck. The book tells the story of a “shotgun-wielding ex-garbage man” on the hunt for his family’s killer, the chase winding through a mystical world.
Bob the Wizard’s cover was a hit. In May, it won the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO) cover contest, an annual competition run by author Mark Lawrence that highlights indie authors in the fantasy genre. But the victory didn’t last long. The same day the winner was announced, readers and fans on Twitter were questioning whether the art was created at least in part using AI tools. The incident highlighted a growing crisis of trust in science fiction and fantasy publishing: in a world where AI-generated media is common, do you know the work you’re looking at was made by a human?
The SPFBO’s cover contest explicitly outlawed using AI tools, and the winning artist, Sean Mauss, initially insisted that he had made the art himself. He even shared a trove of documents and Photoshop files that he said proved the finished product was his own. Readers found the evidence was unconvincing. Using a Photoshop layer in files the artist had shared, Twitter users scoured the archives of Midjourney, a generative AI system, and found images that matched elements in the Bob the Wizard cover. The username that created the images was even spotted in a file name. The striking cover art, it seemed, was simply a collage of Midjourney outputs.
Within a day, Mauss had withdrawn the submission, deactivated several social media accounts, and apparently taken a personal website offline. (An email sent to an address on an archived version of the site wasn’t returned.) Prindle, the book’s author, said on Twitter that he was misled and has since hired a new artist to do the cover. “I’ve woken up to compelling evidence that the cover was at least partly AI generated, breaking the rules of the contest,” Lawrence wrote on his blog. “So, in addition to having been withdrawn, it’s now also disqualified under the existing rules.”
But Lawrence went further than disqualifying Mauss’ entry. In the same blog post, he abandoned the idea of holding a cover contest in the future, saying there wouldn’t be a competition going forward. In Tweets, Lawrence makes clear he’s uninterested in litigating future debates about whether art is human or machine-made.
“I think it needs to be a separate contest, [organized] by someone with the necessary expertise and the appetite for controversy,” he wrote in response to someone suggesting a way forward. “That’s not me.” (Lawrence didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
