When I started my series, I had an idea, a particular scene, or even just a single character in mind. Not necessarily as a clear image. I have always had problems with character descriptions, and that has not changed to this day. A photo from the internet helped to make the character more visual. But photos from the web have disadvantages: licenses! You cannot simply use those images for covers. If, as a hobby writer, you want to show your protagonists on a cover you created yourself, you either have to be very good at drawing, buy licenses, or rely on professional models and photographers. None of that is really an option for a pure hobby project.
This is where 1/6 scale action figures fill the gap. They can serve as models, take different poses, and wear different costumes. If photographed well, perhaps retouched and edited afterwards, you cannot tell that they are dolls. And these figures serve another purpose as well: in display cases, they visualize the invented protagonists, perhaps even recreate scenes. Na-Ri or Johanna suddenly have a face, a body; you see them every day. They become even more real to an author.
And then AI enters the picture.
Images can now be created even without any artistic skill of your own. Suitable covers, free of licensing issues or available under dirt-cheap licenses, are suddenly within reach. And the rigid dolls in the display cases suddenly become real, moving performers in films. One photo is enough, a description, and they start moving!
But this flood of stimuli has a downside: attention spans are shrinking. Not only among readers — those numbers have been falling for decades — but also among authors. It is becoming more difficult to develop long texts, complicated plots, and tangled interconnections. AI is certainly a useful tool, but it has begun to change the world. Mine too.