I’ve used generative AI before, to create illustrations for my Medium stories. I’m embarrassed and won’t ever use it again. Now when I see everyone from my local chamber of commerce to non-profits and authors making the same slop images over and over again, it just makes me sad.

It’s everywhere, and those images look like dandelions in a rose garden.

Make your own books covers, use stock photos, learn Canva or InDesign, hire someone who can.

Setting aside the arguments from theft and environmental damage, it tells people (including your customers and clients!) you’re lazy and couldn’t give a shit about quality.

I don’t read as widely in erotica as some people, but here are the authors I go back to again and again when I want great (sexy!) writing:

• Celia McKinley
• Paragonas Vaunt
• Posy Churchgate
• Elena Dawne
• Megan Landon
• Olive Spencer
• Emily Antoinette
• Ryn Rehnard
• Scarlett Gale
• Pia Monroe
• Hazel Porter
• Polly Liticat

I love this article by Ryan Rousseau, which laments the lazy, assembly-line-like “business” that online erotica has become. He nails the core problem:

The problem is the shameless contempt some erotica writers show for the reader. Contempt is when you keep taking their time and money while acting like they don’t deserve effort. When spicy authors talk about erotica as an addiction or treat their own readers like marks pulling a slot machine lever, they are admitting they don’t respect their audience.

When you’re trying to hit every single trending buzzword and trend – hotwife, mafia boss, shifter – you’re not writing a story, you’re assembling a product. Your reader becomes a data point, your sentences become packaging, and the erotic charge gets flattened into formula. There are literally writers using “beat sheets” who drop in characters and narrative events like it’s paint-by-numbers. That’s painting, I guess, but it’s not art.

Go read the whole thing; it’s excellent. When Ryan writes “It’s about whether you respect the reader enough to revise, to learn, to take pride in the work, to treat explicit writing like it deserves the same standards as anything else,” I feel it in my soul.