Nef House Publishing’s Stance on AI
Technically, this is just my stance on AI. That’s ok. I am Stuart Thaman, and I am the sole owner of Nef House Publishing, Ltd. Co. I speak for the company and myself. I do not speak for any of Nef House’s individual authors, though I suspect we share the same general sentiments.
First: Everything is going to be accused of AI. That’s my Reddit post. Feel free to snoop my account all you want. It is mostly guitars and fitness stuff. Nothing too terribly exciting. Anyway. What does that post mean? In a nutshell, we’re at the point where everything is going to be accused of AI. Your cover art looks bad? Must be AI. Your cover art looks good? Must be AI. Your cover art is average? AI. You get the idea. For starters, most Nef House books (as of 2026) were released before AI was really a thing. I don’t know when any AI was rolled out to the initial public—I am the opposite of a tech junky and do not watch that stuff—but our first books came out in 2012 and 2013. But the accusations are already there in full force. Everyone just assumes everything is AI, especially covers. I don’t think there is much anyone can do about that.
Second: Is AI a bad thing? Well… the quality sure sucks. Like virtually everyone with an internet connection, I’ve fooled around with some free AI stuff to see what it can do. In very general terms, it sucks. Plain and simple. Since I’ve been actively writing A Ruined World lately after ~6 years without touching the series, I needed to go back and harvest details. One of the reasons why I left the series for so long is because my giant note document got lost to the internet void. Without those comprehensive notes, I was lost. So I queued up the glorious audiobook by J. Scott Bennett and listened to the series again while taking notes. I did a pretty good job, but I didn’t catch everything I needed. In particular, I couldn’t remember if a certain character was alive at the end of book 2. I searched the manuscript a ton, but I wanted to be sure. So I handed the pdf to ChatGPT and asked it. The resultant slop was cartoonishly bad. It actually just fabricated a completely new character and told me she was alive. A character that was never in the book in any capacity. So I asked it for a quote. It generated a whole paragraph of nonsense that showed the character alive, and ChatGPT promised me that it was pulling directly from my pdf. That was a pretty telltale sign that AI was not for me.
I tried some others. Out of an abundance of curiosity, I signed up for a free trial for two of the AI “novel generators” where you put in prompts and get a full ~70,000 word manuscript in return. Oh man. The manuscripts I got… Every paragraph was draped in flavor—I daresay a nice flavor—but lacked substance. Everything was just adjectives. Flowy, flowery language with absolutely no meaning at all. I read a couple chapters and nothing happened. It was so vague that I couldn’t even describe what was supposed to happen. And the grammar wasn’t flawless either. I caught a few split infinitives and other issues. But the manuscript as a whole was entirely useless. I couldn’t even use it as an idea prompt to write my own thing. Just nothing but trash.
So to answer the question: using AI is bad. Perhaps I don’t attach as much moral weight to it as so many others do, but that’s ok. This is my take, not theirs, and takes are allowed to change, evolve, adapt, and grow over time. Maybe my take will be wildly different in 6 months. Or maybe next week.
Third: I see AI as a tool. There were probably hundreds of painters screaming blasphemy when the first camera hit the market. There were probably hordes of furious cave painters holding their brushes and decrying the invention of paper. Real art is on stone walls, after all. But anyway, there are artists who use cameras. That’s great! There are artists who don’t use cameras. Also great! Good art is good art regardless of the tools. Again, that’s my personal take. Perhaps I am wrong and there exists an objective standard by which art is judged. I do not know.
Fourth: Do we use AI here at Nef House? No, it sucks. We also don’t write our books with charcoal and a slate or draw our covers on cave walls in Southern France. The tool just isn’t good. Any creator using bad tools is almost certain to produce a bad product. Our #1 goal is produce good products, so we use the best tools. Our (expensive) cover artists are some of the best in the industry. Names known since long before AI was a thing. The same is true of our editors, proofers, and our valiant formatter.
Fifth: I have used AI for a couple things. I had it make some character illustrations so I could visualize certain characters better. Are the illustrations good? Eh. They’re better than I could do by leaps and bounds, but that’s a low bar. Did it help? Yes. I’ve also had ChatGPT give me ideas for names. Have I used any of them? I honestly don’t remember. Maybe. More often that not, what I have found to be the main benefit of AI is getting it to generate a list of options or ideas. I then use that list to help get my own ideas flowing properly, and it has worked fairly well. I also have some super cool decks of horror / surreal art that I got at a convention some untold number of years ago, and those illustrations do the exact same thing for me. I grab a couple at random, spend a few minutes looking at them, and it usually works well to get the ol’ juices juicing again. Other times when I get stuck I just need to clear my head for an hour. Working out, playing guitar, or even a long shower can sometimes do the trick.
Sixth: Will Nef House use AI in the future? I’m sure many authors (and other creatives) will. Right now, the tool just isn’t very good. Perhaps it will be much better in the future. I do not know. Will AI ever be able to generate a full novel or cover on its own that is professional quality? I give it a slim chance. Again, I’ve seen enough sci-fi to know that anything is possible, but man. That’s a STEEP hill to climb. I just don’t see it happening. Apparently, AI has already (illegally) read every Stephen King novel, but it absolutely CANNOT write to King’s quality. I really think the odds of AI being able to spit out a novel of any quality within this decade are very nearly zero.
Seventh: We’re doing it the way we always have. Nef House publishes quality novels written by human beings with cool covers from other human beings and editing by different human beings and so on and so forth. We use the absolute best tools at our disposal, and AI isn’t in that toolkit. Not even close.
CHEERS!
As a final aside, if you haven’t watched A.I. or I, Robot yet, go watch those movies. Some of my favorites!