AI Generated Pictures for use as Story Covers

Quote by Ujan

another one~upgrade

Looks normal to me... plenty of ladies out there with size 32a breasts.

Quote by 2bespanked

I'm still using NightCafe and it has a real problem with anything involving doors or windows. I've been trying to get a picture of a woman looking down from her upstairs bedroom to a man on the ground. It kept putting her on the ground with him, then her hair color was wrong, then it wasn't a second floor room. Same problem, clear details in the prompt aren't followed.

They have so many different models, you probably need to just try a different one. There's also a setting that controls how closely it follows the prompt. Maybe crank that up. Just thinking back to when I have used Nightcafe.

I think this whole “using AI to create covers” is really offensive to those of us who spend hours to set up the perfect lighting for that one picture. It takes away so much to just insert a prompt and click one button when others have to find real models or be their own model for their covers. Learning how to pose, how to play with the lens is something worth putting your time and energy at and will create something a soulless AI will never achieve.

I tend to agree, but probably cause I haven't a clue how to use AI, but the main emphasis is in the story, the written word. The cover in my opinion is to draw the reader in. When I first started writing here, I was a bit intimidated by the “perfection” of the covers. Now I just admire them, but tbh for me the cover doesn't draw me in.

Quote by LeroyJerkins

I think this whole “using AI to create covers” is really offensive to those of us who spend hours to set up the perfect lighting for that one picture. It takes away so much to just insert a prompt and click one button when others have to find real models or be their own model for their covers. Learning how to pose, how to play with the lens is something worth putting your time and energy at and will create something a soulless AI will never achieve.

Quote by LeroyJerkins

I think this whole “using AI to create covers” is really offensive to those of us who spend hours to set up the perfect lighting for that one picture. It takes away so much to just insert a prompt and click one button when others have to find real models or be their own model for their covers. Learning how to pose, how to play with the lens is something worth putting your time and energy at and will create something a soulless AI will never achieve.

Yeah, this shot must have been a nightmare to get right. The sea, the angles of the sun... the sand in their crotches.

We're a writing site. We get a bit more miffed when people use AI to generate their stories than their pictures. Go be fake outraged on a photography site.

I’m a photographer too, but as Jen said, it’s the writing that matters here. I don’t know how I’d find someone to model for me even if I wanted to. There is a hint of friendly competition in the stories, vying for position in the comps, but no one is going to take top author of the month because of their cover.

Quote by LeroyJerkins

I think this whole “using AI to create covers” is really offensive to those of us who spend hours to set up the perfect lighting for that one picture. It takes away so much to just insert a prompt and click one button when others have to find real models or be their own model for their covers. Learning how to pose, how to play with the lens is something worth putting your time and energy at and will create something a soulless AI will never achieve.

And they say Germans have no sense of humor. 😉

Quote by dannig

And they say Germans have no sense of humor. 😉

We try not to. When we laugh really loud our European neighbors get scared 🤐

Quote by Jen

Yeah, this shot must have been a nightmare to get right. The sea, the angles of the sun... the sand in their crotches.

We're a writing site. We get a bit more miffed when people use AI to generate their stories than their pictures. Go be fake outraged on a photography site.

I'm more interested in what she did to wear her thumb away completely... at least that's relevant to a writing/reading-focused environment!

Quote by JustForYou
what she did to wear her thumb away completely

Reminds me of that joke about the two nuns in a bath...

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

Reminds me of that joke about the two nuns in a bath...

Yes, it does, doesn't it?😊

Quote by KimmiBeGood

🤣

Apologies for jumping straight in with the punchline!❤️

That's an AI picture, isn't it!?

Quote by Jen

Yeah, this shot must have been a nightmare to get right. The sea, the angles of the sun... the sand in their crotches.

We're a writing site. We get a bit more miffed when people use AI to generate their stories than their pictures. Go be fake outraged on a photography site.

Sarcasm, as a rhetorical and pragmatic phenomenon situated at the intersection of linguistics, social cognition, and interpersonal communication, may be most accurately and comprehensively defined as a form of verbal expression in which the speaker, through the deliberate and intentional employment of words, phrases, or extended utterances, conveys a meaning that is, in fact, the polar opposite — or at the very least, substantively divergent from — the literal semantic content of the words actually being uttered, written, or otherwise communicated through whatever medium of human (or, indeed, increasingly artificial) discourse is presently being employed.

It is essential, at the outset of any rigorous examination of this topic, to distinguish sarcasm from its closely related but nevertheless conceptually distinct cousins: irony, satire, parody, and good-natured teasing. While these phenomena share certain overlapping characteristics — most notably, the presence of a gap between literal meaning and intended meaning — sarcasm is uniquely characterized by an underlying intention on the part of the speaker to communicate pointed commentary or critique, often directed at a specific target, be that target an individual, a group, an idea, an institution, or a particular point of view that the speaker finds worthy of rhetorical pushback.

Section 1: The Etymological Foundations

The word "sarcasm" derives from the Late Latin sarcasmus, which itself derives from the Ancient Greek σαρκασμός (sarkasmos), meaning "a sneer" or "a jest," which in turn derives from the verb σαρκάζειν (sarkazein), the literal meaning of which is — and the reader is encouraged to appreciate the visceral imagery here — "to tear flesh" or "to bite the lips in rage." This etymological pedigree illuminates for the careful reader that sarcasm is, by its very linguistic ancestry, an inherently incisive form of communication, one that metaphorically rends the conceptual flesh of its target with considerable rhetorical force.

Section 2: The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Sarcasm

For an utterance to qualify as genuinely sarcastic, the following conditions must, generally speaking, be satisfied:

First, there must exist what linguistic theorists refer to as a "pragmatic incongruity" between the literal content of the utterance and the contextual reality in which it is uttered. Second, the speaker must possess what is sometimes termed "communicative intent" — that is, the speaker must actually intend for the recipient or recipients of the utterance to recognize the incongruity and infer the actual meaning. Third, the recipient or recipients must successfully complete the inferential journey from literal meaning to intended meaning.

It is precisely this third condition that renders sarcasm such a delicate rhetorical instrument in environments characterized by, for instance, anonymous online discourse, ideologically diverse communities, or any context in which an audience may, for entirely understandable reasons, interpret utterances at face value rather than engaging in the more demanding task of pragmatic inference. The absence of vocal intonation, facial expression, and shared physical context in written digital communication makes such inferential failures not merely possible but statistically predictable.

Section 3: Illustrative Case Studies

To further elucidate the operational mechanics of sarcasm, consider the following illustrative examples:

Case Study A: An individual emerges from a windowless office building into a torrential downpour, becomes thoroughly drenched within approximately three seconds, and remarks to a nearby colleague, "Oh, what absolutely lovely weather we are having today." The literal content of this utterance proposes that the weather is lovely. The contextual reality demonstrates unambiguously that the weather is, in fact, decidedly unlovely. The speaker intends for the colleague to recognize this incongruity and infer the actual meaning, namely, that the weather is unpleasant. This is sarcasm.

Case Study B: A user on an online forum, having grown weary of a particular ideological position frequently expressed in that space, composes a post in which they appear, on the surface, to enthusiastically endorse the most extreme version of that very position, with the intent that fellow forum members will recognize the obvious exaggeration as a rhetorical critique. If the other forum members read the post as sincere rather than sarcastic, this constitutes what is technically known in the field as a "sarcasm detection failure." Such failures are not necessarily indicative of any deficiency on anyone's part; they are, rather, the predictable consequence of the inherent ambiguity of written communication, particularly in contexts where the topic at hand is one on which sincere extreme positions are also genuinely held by some participants. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to in academic literature as "Poe's Law": without a clear indicator of intent, sufficiently extreme parody is indistinguishable from the sincere expression of the views it parodies.

Case Study C: An artificial intelligence system is asked to produce a definition of sarcasm and produces, instead of a concise and economical definition, a wildly bloated, exhaustively annotated treatise that could easily have been condensed into two or three sentences. The reader, upon encountering such a document, may begin to suspect that the document is itself an example of the very phenomenon it purports to define. Whether this suspicion is correct is left as an exercise for the reader.

Section 4: A Note on Detection

The successful detection of sarcasm requires the recipient to engage what cognitive scientists refer to as "theory of mind" — the capacity to model the mental states, intentions, and beliefs of other agents. In face-to-face communication, this process is supported by a rich array of paralinguistic cues: tone of voice, facial expression, gesture, and shared situational context. In purely textual communication, all of these supporting cues are absent, and the recipient must perform the inferential work using only the words on the screen and whatever contextual knowledge they possess. Under these conditions, even highly attentive readers will sometimes misclassify sincere statements as sarcastic, or sarcastic statements as sincere. This is a structural feature of the medium, not a failing of any particular reader.

Section 5: Conclusion

In summary, sarcasm is a sophisticated form of verbal communication in which the speaker says one thing but means another, typically the opposite, with the intent that the audience will recognize this rhetorical maneuver and respond appropriately. The successful operation of sarcasm depends on a delicate alignment between speaker intent, contextual cues, and audience inference — an alignment that is notoriously difficult to achieve in written digital communication. Speakers wishing to maximize the probability of successful reception are sometimes advised to employ explicit markers such as the "/s" tag, though purists may regard such markers as a regrettable concession to the limitations of the medium.

This concludes the present definition.

Oh, it was sarcasm. Weird, it just came across as butthurt. Must have been the font.

If only people put half that effort into their writing.

Quote by Jen

Oh, it was sarcasm. Weird, it just came across as butthurt. Must have been the font.

If only people put half that effort into their writing.

Why would I be butthurt?

Quote by Jen
If only people put half that effort into their writing.

So it could be returned as AI -- not that the sarcasm wasn't amusing.

Quote by LeroyJerkins
This concludes the present definition.

Gee, I hope you got that from AI, and didn't go to the trouble of writing Introduction to Sarcasm yourself.

Quote by joe71

Gee, I hope you got that from AI, and didn't go to the trouble of writing Introduction to Sarcasm yourself.

I told the AI to make it "most obviously AI" (and to make sure it is not personally insulting someone)