99% AI-Generated? The Story Behind Rattleplague's "Nuclear" Cover Art

How a completely human-made album cover was identified as AI-generated with 99% confidence — and why that says more about AI detection than the artwork itself.

I recently designed the cover artwork for Nuclear, the latest single from my band, Rattleplague. As a graphic designer who has been creating artwork for bands and musicians for years, designing a cover for my own band is always an interesting process. There are no demanding clients, endless revisions, or disagreements about creative direction. Well, except for the occasional argument with myself.

But this particular cover ended up giving me an unexpected reason to write about the creative process behind it.

Out of curiosity, I uploaded the finished artwork to Is This AI, an online service that attempts to determine whether an image was created using artificial intelligence.

The result? According to the service, the artwork was 99% likely to be AI-generated.

There's just one tiny problem with that conclusion.

Not a single AI-generated element was used to create the cover.

So, I thought it might be interesting to explain exactly how I designed the artwork, where the different elements came from, and how I put everything together using traditional graphic design techniques.

And perhaps, along the way, demonstrate why we should be careful about trusting AI detection tools.

Starting With an Idea — and an Unexpected Color

Every design project begins somewhere. Sometimes I have a clear visual concept in my head before opening any software. Other times, the process involves experimenting with different ideas until something starts to feel right.

With Nuclear, I began by thinking about the atmosphere, visual elements, and color palette that would best represent the song.

The track deals with power, intimidation, and the constant threat of escalating conflict. I wanted the artwork to feel aggressive, unsettling, and slightly apocalyptic.

After experimenting with several different color schemes, I eventually settled on a strong yellow tone.

That was actually a somewhat surprising decision for me. Yellow is not a color I frequently use in heavy metal artwork, where darker palettes, reds, blacks, and various shades of decay tend to dominate.

But this time, yellow simply felt right. It created a powerful visual atmosphere that complemented the subject matter of the song.

Of course, I tested several other colors during the process before returning to the yellow version.

Sometimes the first instinct turns out to be the right one.

Digging Into My Old Image Archives

Over the years, particularly between 2010 and 2015, I purchased quite a collection of stock images from various image libraries, including 123RF, iStockphoto, and Freepik. Many of these images were bought during promotional sales, and I've accumulated a fairly extensive archive of visual material. Remember, those were the times no one was prompting any images.

Some images have been used in previous projects, while others have been sitting on my hard drives for years, waiting for the right opportunity.

One particular image came to mind when I started developing the Nuclear artwork.

It was a black-and-white photograph of a demonic-looking woman that I had previously edited for use as a decorative element on Rattleplague's website.

Back around 2015, I had manipulated the original photograph by duplicating and mirroring parts of the image, combining them into a single symmetrical composition.

The result was a rather disturbing, almost supernatural-looking figure.

I had always liked that image, and I felt it deserved a more prominent role than simply being a background element on a website.

Now, roughly a decade later, it finally found its place on the cover of Nuclear.

That's one of the things I enjoy about graphic design. An image you created or modified years ago can suddenly become the perfect ingredient for something completely different.

Back to Basics: Pencil, Paper, and Sketches

Before opening Photoshop, I did something rather old-fashioned.

I picked up a pencil and started sketching ideas on paper.

Yes, actual paper. Apparently, people still do that. I love it!

I made several rough sketches to explore how the different visual elements might work together. I experimented with the position of the central figure, the typography, the circular element, and the overall visual balance.

These weren't particularly beautiful drawings, nor were they intended to be. Their purpose was simply to help me organize my thoughts and establish the basic composition.

Once I had a direction that seemed promising, I moved on to Photoshop to start experimenting with the actual artwork.

Every element of the final cover was assembled, modified, or created using traditional image-editing methods.

Building the Apocalypse in Photoshop

With the central figure in place, I started constructing the rest of the composition.

I tested various examples. Here are some of teh stuff I rejected:

I returned to my old stock image archives and found photographs of nuclear explosions and flames that worked well with the overall concept.

The flames visible along the bottom of the finished cover came from this material.

I combined the images in Photoshop, adjusting their appearance and blending them into the composition.

Another prominent element is the large circular outline behind the central figure.

Despite its dramatic appearance, there's nothing particularly mysterious about how it was created.

It's simply a circle made with Photoshop's shape tools.

No artificial intelligence. No complicated tricks. Just a basic geometric shape.

The cover also features cracks and distressed textures, which were created using Photoshop brushes. These helped give the image a damaged, chaotic appearance, reinforcing the visual atmosphere I wanted to achieve.

Gradually, the separate elements began to form a coherent composition.

This is the part of the design process I particularly enjoy: taking images, shapes, textures, and typography that might seem completely unrelated and turning them into something that feels like a single piece of artwork.

Typography, Hidden Lyrics, and Small Details

Typography plays an important role in the finished design.

For the single title, Nuclear, I selected a typeface called Brokenscript OT. Its distressed, irregular appearance suited the visual theme extremely well.

I also used the same font for the text elements running along the left and right edges of the cover.

Those texts aren't random decorative words, by the way.

They're lyrics from the chorus of "Nuclear".

They're easy to miss at first glance, but anyone who takes a closer look at the artwork might recognize them.

I like including small details like this in my designs. They provide something extra for people who spend more than a few seconds looking at the artwork.

There are also three lines positioned to the left of the Nuclear title.

Once again, the explanation is incredibly sophisticated.

I made them with Photoshop's Line Tool.

Groundbreaking technology, I know.

Finally, I added some effects to the Rattleplague logo using Photoshop's Layer Styles to make it fit the overall appearance of the artwork.

The Final Touch: Analog Efex Pro 2

After completing the composition in Photoshop, I wanted to give the entire image a more unified visual character.

For the final processing, I used Analog Efex Pro 2, part of the Nik Collection.

The software allowed me to fine-tune the overall toning and atmosphere, helping the various photographic and graphic elements feel more connected.

This final stage was particularly important because the artwork contained material from several different sources.

Without careful color grading and finishing, a composition like this can easily look like a collection of unrelated images pasted together.

My goal was to make everything feel like it belonged in the same visual world.

And after the final adjustments, the cover was finished.

So Why Did an AI Detector Get It So Wrong?

Now we return to the reason I decided to write this article in the first place.

After uploading the finished cover to Is This AI, I received a result indicating that the image was 99% likely to have been generated by artificial intelligence.

Considering that I had personally designed the entire composition, using photographs from my archives, Photoshop brushes, geometric shapes, typography, and traditional image-editing techniques, the result was rather amusing.

But it also raises a serious question.

How reliable are AI image detection tools when they analyze complex digital artwork?

The Nuclear cover is heavily manipulated, stylized, abstract, symmetrical, and visually dramatic. It contains numerous layers, photographic elements, textures, and effects.

These are also characteristics that can appear in AI-generated images.

It's possible that some of these visual properties influenced the detector's classification. However, without knowing exactly how the service analyzes images, there's no way to determine why it produced that particular result.

What we do know is that, in this case, the conclusion was incorrect.

And it's important to understand that a detector's reported confidence score is not the same thing as independently verified proof of an image's origin.

A 99% result may look convincing, but it doesn't magically turn a false classification into a fact.

This matters because AI-generated imagery has become a controversial subject in graphic design, photography, illustration, and the creative industries in general.

Artists are increasingly being questioned about whether their work is genuinely their own. In some cases, people may use automated detection tools to support accusations without having any actual knowledge of the creative process.

That's a rather dangerous direction if the tools themselves can produce confidently incorrect results.

AI Is a Tool. It Isn't the Artist.

I want to make one thing clear: I'm not opposed to artificial intelligence in creative work.

Quite the opposite.

I regularly experiment with AI tools and believe they can offer interesting possibilities for graphic designers, artists, and other creative professionals.

But I also believe there's an important distinction between using AI as part of a creative workflow and assuming that every highly manipulated or visually complex image must have been generated by AI.

The Nuclear cover is a good example of why that distinction matters.

It combines stock photography, image manipulation, traditional sketching, Photoshop tools, typography, compositing, and color grading.

In other words, the kind of digital artwork that graphic designers have been creating long before modern generative AI became widely available.

If I had used AI to create the artwork, I would have no problem saying so.

But I didn't. For example, I wrote this text all of my own, yet asked ChatGPT to fix any mispellings or bad vocabulary.

And that's precisely why the 99% AI detection result makes this particular experiment so interesting.

The Human Behind the Pixels

Ultimately, I'm very pleased with how the Nuclear cover turned out.

The finished artwork reflects the atmosphere and themes of the song, while also giving me an opportunity to experiment with a color palette I don't normally use.

It also gave me a reason to revisit an image I had originally manipulated over a decade ago and finally put it to good use.

The irony of having a completely human-made design classified as almost certainly AI-generated is simply an unexpected bonus.

Perhaps the most important lesson here is that an automated classification cannot replace understanding how an artwork was actually created.

Whether a piece of art was created using Photoshop, traditional illustration, photography, artificial intelligence, or a combination of different techniques, its origin should be established through evidence rather than assumptions based on appearance.

And sometimes, a circle really is just a circle.

Even if an algorithm is 99% convinced otherwise.