We collected responses from over 500 digital artists, traditional painters, photographers, illustrators and graphic designers who had used platforms such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, among others. Is this really the sort of tool that can help artists create great work?Īt Playform AI, a generative AI art platform that I founded, we conducted a survey to better understand artists’ experiences with generative AI. Today’s AI systems are not as intelligent as they seem they are essentially smart retrieval systems that have a huge memory and work by association. So to write a useful text prompt, users need to insert many nondescriptive keywords for the AI system to create a corresponding image. On other sites, the caption describes the graphic engine and hardware used to render an image. On some websites, like Flickr, a caption typically describes the type of camera and the lens used. Captions are typically written to complement the visual experience in web browsing.įor example, the caption might describe the name of the photographer and the copyright holder. Think about what a typical image caption tells about an image. To learn how to better control the outputs, it’s important to recognize that most of these systems are trained on images and captions from the internet. It takes a lot of effort, and much trial and error, to find the right words.

There’s a relatively new term for this: prompt engineering.īasically, the role of an artist using these tools is reduced to reverse-engineering the system to find the right keywords to compel the system to generate the desired output. That long prompt is not necessarily descriptive of the image but typically uses lots of keywords to invoke the system of what’s in the artist’s mind.

In contrast, an artist might need to write an essaylike prompt to generate a high-quality image that reflects their vision – with the right composition, the right lighting and the correct shading. Generative AI is seen as a promising tool for coming up with video game characters.

Best drawing software for free