AI Brief: one sentence in, cover art out

AI Brief turns one sentence about your book into finished cover art with the top third left empty for your title.

Most cover generators want a paragraph of art-director vocabulary. This one wants a sentence about your story: who, where, and what is wrong. Everything else — genre, cover format, style, light, composition, texture — is a preset you pick rather than a phrase you have to invent, so the model receives a structured request instead of a wish list, and you get one proof back in about twenty seconds.

One rule is built into every brief: the top third of the frame is kept quiet. Your title is never painted into the image. It is set afterwards as live vector type on a layer above the art, which is why it stays razor-sharp at 300 DPI while the artwork underneath can still be edited, replaced or re-run.

How to use it

1. Write your book in one sentence
   Open the Brief scene in the AI hub and describe the story in one line: "a detective tracing a woman who vanished at a remote lighthouse". Concrete nouns beat adjectives — a lighthouse, a wedding dress, a burned letter give the model something to draw, while "moody" and "gripping" give it nothing.
2. Set the genre and the format
   Pick the genre so your shelf's conventions are applied, then the format: front cover only, full wrap for a KDP paperback with back, spine and front in one image, or the ebook ratio sized for the store thumbnail.
3. Tune the look, or leave it automatic
   Style is the third dropdown, beside genre: minimal, cinematic, illustrated, painterly, vintage or bold graphic, with automatic-by-genre as the default. Light, composition and texture are not dropdowns — they are rows of chips hidden one level down, so open the collapsed Advanced options panel to reach them and tap what you want: twilight or hard contrast, single object or wide landscape, film grain or clean digital. All of it is optional, and left untouched it follows the genre, which is the right default for a first proof.
4. Name what you do not want
   At the bottom of that same Advanced options panel sits the unwanted-elements field, a short exclusion list: faces, birds, lettering, modern buildings. It is the fastest fix for the two things AI covers get wrong most often — invented text and people you never asked for.
5. Run it and place the proof
   One brief costs one credit and returns one proof in about twenty seconds. The Brief scene is a single panel rather than a two-column workspace, so the proof drops into the Proofs from this session strip below the form. Tap it to place it on the canvas: the art layer is filled, while your typography layer sits above it, untouched and still editable.

What it solves

A crime debut where every stock photo is already taken

Search any stock library for a foggy pier and you will find the same picture on four other thrillers in your category. A brief produces art that exists only on your cover, and the genre setting keeps it inside thriller conventions — near-black ground, one accent color, a single ominous subject — instead of drifting into fantasy.

A science-fiction world no photographer has visited

Orbital rings, a drowned city, the interior of a colony ship: this is where stock simply runs out. Put the place in your sentence, set composition to wide landscape, and you get a scene no photo library carries. Run it two or three times — each proof is a different world, and the one you keep becomes the base for everything else.

A paperback that needs back, spine and front in one file

KDP paperbacks upload as a single wrap image, and a front-only picture cannot be stretched to fill one. Choose full wrap in the format dropdown and enter your page count in the studio's technical settings first, so the spine is the right width for your paper. The brief then composes art that reads across the whole wrap instead of a front cover with two empty wings.

Frequently asked questions

How long should the one sentence be?

One sentence, up to two hundred characters, with a live counter under the field. Load it with nouns you can picture: a place, an object, a moment of trouble. Words like dark, epic or gripping are read by the model as almost nothing, while "a lighthouse in fog at dusk" is already a composition.

Will the first proof be the cover I imagined?

Usually not exactly, and it is not meant to be. One brief returns one proof for one credit — read it as a first response to your sentence, not a commission. The normal path is two or three briefs to find the direction, then Variation to choose between siblings and Region fix to repair a single wrong detail, which is far cheaper than re-rolling a whole cover to fix one hand.

Why does it leave the top of the image empty?

Because that band belongs to your title. Art with a busy top third forces you to either shrink the title until a browsing reader cannot read it or drop a box behind it. The brief reserves the space instead, and the studio sets your title there as live vector type — which is also why no AI operation can misspell or blur your book title.

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