No Longer Trending on Artstation: Prompt Analysis of Generative AI Art
This study addresses the impact of generative AI art on artists and visual cultures, highlighting its incremental insights into user behavior and societal effects.
The paper analyzed over 3 million prompts and images from generative AI systems like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, finding that prompting largely emphasizes surface aesthetics and reinforces cultural norms, with dominant uses being recreational rather than artistic.
Image generation using generative AI is rapidly becoming a major new source of visual media, with billions of AI generated images created using diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney over the last few years. In this paper we collect and analyse over 3 million prompts and the images they generate. Using natural language processing, topic analysis and visualisation methods we aim to understand collectively how people are using text prompts, the impact of these systems on artists, and more broadly on the visual cultures they promote. Our study shows that prompting focuses largely on surface aesthetics, reinforcing cultural norms, popular conventional representations and imagery. We also find that many users focus on popular topics (such as making colouring books, fantasy art, or Christmas cards), suggesting that the dominant use for the systems analysed is recreational rather than artistic.