There is an expected eventuallity where genAI art starts getting substantially worse. As AI images become more common, the training aggregates start including AI art. As the portion of a training set represented by AI art increases, the AI trained on it becomes much further abstracted from the original concept. If you think AI ears are sloppy, imagine what an AI trained on genAI art of ears (instead of on human ears) would output. However, nobody in the field considers this an immediate problem because for now at least, AI art is still uncommon enough and easy enough to filter out that there is minimal representation of AI art in AI training sets. For the problem of boring covers on SH, I would say whoever chose the images was being lazy.
This is already happening.
AI is being fed AI images, causing it to become ...
...inbred, if you will.
That's because "AI" isn't actually AI, it is random at worst, and the collage at best, and it is more clearly visible in the text as it isn't actually intelligent and unable to understand context, or content, resulting to place A next to B because A is placed next to B in 100 cases. Except, it is not what the users, the actual humans, expect it to do, they expect it to learn, to understand what they want, but they are making it worse each time they fed it something that is AI generated. It will never become fully trained, it's impossible.
But since corporate executives are illiterate madmen who want to bloat the sun while relying on solar energy, they think the AI will let them save on manpower, but ...
It literally can't.
Generative "AI" needs constant human input. It can't work without it - like at all.
The "AI" art, or "art", on SH is however something else.
You need to have cover, and it must be pretty, as you won't get readers otherwise.
The readers do not care how much heart you put into stick pictures, they want professional art, they want it
now, and they want it for free, otherwise they won't invest any attention for it, hence "AI" art, or "art", is the only option.
Learning to draw professionally is out of question, a most of the authors are amateurs, and they won't learn in any manageable time. If you are a good artist by 20, you were probably drawing since you could hold pencil....
Of course, you could commission art, but that cover cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and most of the writers are amateurs that are never going to earn a penny, and cheaper is not an option.
Cheaper is AI generated, and at this point, it is better to write a prompt yourself, and say you did, than paying a scammer pretending to be an artist.... and it truth, even expensive won't save you from false allegations.
