Prompts and filters
Do you create for a living? If you do, you had better create some awareness of what AI can and can’t do.
It may seem like artificial intelligence (AI) is coming for our jobs. It was bad enough when internet outsourcing created a market for $5 logos, but now anybody can create interesting, rich visuals with machine-learning engines such as DALL-E or Midjourney. It used to be pretty easy to spot spammy or scammy emails because their grammar was wonky, but now sites like Essay Genius can generate accurate, readable content in less than one minute. Apparently, even the music industry is under threat from AI-generated songs.
What’s the solution if you’re a designer, copywriter or musician? Prompts and filters. You may have already heard of prompt engineering. A skill that will be increasingly in-demand (there’s already a marketplace for prompts), prompt engineering means composing a string of words for an AI engine that will optimize the output according to an initial preference. In other words, knowing how to ask for the exact image or the text that you have in mind. For example, a DALL-E prompt might be “a photo of an orange”, but a well-engineered prompt might be “a photo-realistic close-up of an orange glistening with dew on a pale wooden chopping board with a rustic kitchen out of focus in the background.” You can literally use that last one to make an ad (or at least a social media post or imagery supporting content creation).
But this is where filters come in. The AI will propose several images, and then it’s up to the person who wrote the prompt to decide whether to use one of them as-is, to modify it in photo editing software, or to perform another refined generation of images using inpainting or outpainting). This is a skill that should not be underestimated. The ability to filter, edit and mashup will become a core competency in a world where raw generation of content is performed by AI.
And don’t forget that the ultimate advantage any designer, writer or musician has over AI is imagination: the ability to have a basic idea or visualization of an asset prior to its production. That’s why an expert artist has a clear idea of the picture “in their head” before they execute.
So don’t despair, fellow creative professionals — hone your prompt engineering skills, refine your filters and, above all, make sure you never lose sight of how important curiosity and imagination are. Because machines will never have those.
