Is the image you made with AI, your art?

An “NFT art collector” recently asked at a conference, “How can we really know which AI artists are worth collecting?”

I recommended that before buying a digital artwork made with AI, to first ask the artist to reveal their prompt. If the AI prompt consists only of a couple of lines, the AI artwork is likely to be mostly “imagined” by the AI.

The more detailed and specific the prompt, the higher percentage of its creation could be attributable to the human artist. Because if we simply ask AI to create: “A pink house made of cotton candy,” the possibilities for correct answers are infinite. Consequently, the percentage of the human prompter’s artistic ownership would be inversely proportional.

The prompt for an artwork in the AI era must be, in of itself, a Haiku, an ideogram, the work of a comedian, a poet, or a true prompt engineer.

In the future, art collectors should acquire prompts instead of art. Because in a world where execution is a commodity, the prompt is the new artwork.

A good prompt should be capable of triggering a new image in the mind of either a person or an artificial intelligence. Following that idea, this page is a prompt, and this book is a series of interwoven prompts. And those of you buying this book are helping support new prompts.

The question that remains is: If your personal brainstorming-AI creates from your past prompts, are the new ideas it suggests, now your ideas?