Are AI Image Generators Improving Skin Color and Racial or Ethnicity Bias?

You may have noticed if you already picked up a copy of Cronicle's first fiction release Murder of Crows: Reverse All Tides about a mermaid reincarnated into a cursed town of walking corpses, that there is something off with the cover. You've probably seen this issue a lot lately: the skin color of the main character on the book cover doesn't match the character's skin in the book.

I struggled with the decision to use the OpenArt image generator for this project designing background cover art for the cover later designed in house, because overall this image generator has a fantastic stylistic element that matches the fantasy and American Gothic eco-horror vibe I was going for with the first Murder of Crows cover.

Prompt: create a jpg image of a mermaid standing in a well in the middle of a Victorian town full of dead people in old-fashioned clothes.

Result: A great start! Same style as the photo above, but needed some tweaking.

Prompt: Great, now add some blood on the mermaid.

Result: It even did a great job with this request, which can have a garish result on Gemini image generator or other similar tools like the AI within Canva's design tool.

But...

Prompt: Give the mermaid dark skin.

Result: A cartoon character similar to the Disney princess from Charmed was pasted on top of the original scen with mismatched style. Reader, no matter what prompt I gave the OpenArt tool from that point on, it straight up ruined the photo. I made the call to use the image anyway, but wanted to reflect on this challenge. It should be easier to create inclusive art using AI tools, but they are still playing catchup on inputting enough racially diverse data to image databases that this problem is quite glaring at the moment.

I tried using other tools, same result basically, or the entire image went off-course stylistically and I ended up with a town square full of cartoon zombie faces, you name it. Asking for dark skin in the foreground character threw off the entire algorithm.

For the next books in the Murder of Crows fantasy/romantasy/eco-horror series set in an alternate dimension of the state of Michigan, I will use covers that avoid this issue by... well by killing off all the humans anyway so I can get the AI to create sea creatures or shamanic nature spirit characters with whatever skin color I want on demand. It's pretty great. But for the last book in the series, Ghosts of Detroit, where a woman returns to her childhood home to find it full of ghosts who didn't want to leave their city? Same problem. I set the house on fire, I put ghosts hanging out the windows, I tried putting people on the lawn. I got a sort of casper cartoon result when asking the OpenArt tool to create a haunted house type background with a girl sitting on top of the front porch. And if I asked for specific skin color, oh boy it got weird.

Do you know why AI image generator tools are currently mismatching cartoonish images of Black American type characters on top of photorealistic or fantasy art backgrounds rather than matching the style visually to each other? If I'm missing something I would love to learn more about how to wrangle these new tools. Let me know in comments or on social.