AI vs human designed book covers

For my upcoming novel, I could budget for paying for a person to copyedit or design the cover. I opted for splashing out for the cover, and doing copyediting myself (with the use of a few tools and friendly readers). Having worked at the Open University producing course content for 30 years, I _really_ value the work of editors, so ideally I would have paid for that also. The fact that I opted for paying for a cover, given how much I recognise the importance of a good editor, is a sign of how much I value the input of someone who really knows what they're doing with regards to design.

Design, and in particular, book cover design is one of those areas where the uninformed will blithely claim that "AI can do it all now". Just for fun, I tried creating a few AI generated covers for the Recluse Rules, so this provides a neat comparison of the virtues of both approaches (with a sample of one, admittedly).

Here are a few of the AI ones, which took a few iterations to get to this stage, using a range of tools. First a couple featuring the three main characters in a 1950s pulp style:

Then one with the theme of the rules more prominent:

And one that highlights the cursed tusk:

And lastly, one with the cat:

To be fair these are pretty impressive technically. An tool has created these from scratch following text descriptions I provided. A decade ago this would have blown my mind. I think I prefer the last one out of them all, although the pulp ones are fun. But they all have a distinct AI feel to them. Now let's compare them with the one that my designer, Roderick Brydon, came up with:

To my taste, this is a LOT better than any of the AI ones. I would be more tempted to read this book from the cover alone. It is possible that if I described this cover to AI it could generate a similar cover, but that is the point, it takes a human with a good design aesthetic and experience to devise this from scratch.

Anyway, here's to human designers. Anyone prefer the AI ones?