The Problem with AI, and Isabella’s Rake

The 1997 cover Recently, guest reviewer Lisa submitted a review for Isabella’s Rake, a 1997 Signet Regency by June Calvin that has been rereleased from Histria Press. Lisa didn’t see the cover, nor did I, until I looked it up after editing and formatting the review for publication. The new cover is most likely generated by AI. We refuse to host or promote generative AI content at SBTB. We all hate Gen AI. Hate it a lot. Speaking personally, AI stole my books, for which I’m getting part of the Anthropic settlement, and has scraped this entire website for use in language model training and for Google’s AI summaries, which have in turn decimated traffic to independent sites like this one. Learning that the cover for the new release from the new publisher was very likely gen AI put us in a strange position, which led to this post. On one hand, we want to help our community find books they might like, and Isabella’s Rake seems like a book many of you might like! On the other, we do not want to host, promote, or profit from the use of generative AI book covers. As many of you have said in your comments over the past few years, a cover that appears to be AI-generated indicates a deep disr...