AI painting has given rise to a new profession: now you can make money by selling DALL-E 2 prompts, and the platform takes a 20% cut

But it's not easy for human players to get the AI to produce something they're happy with on a consistent basis. There is a dizzying array of techniques that people are sharing on the internet.

Guess which of the two hints returned using DALL・E: "A very beautiful painting with a mountain next to a waterfall" or "A very, very, very beautiful painting with a mountain next to a waterfall" would produce a better result?

The answer is the latter.

Phillip Isola, a 2022 Sloan Research Award winner and Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, conducted an interesting experiment on Twitter. The prompt "a painting in which a mountain is next to a waterfall" was modified with 0 very and 22 very respectively.

The final results were compared as follows.

The more "very" there are, the more beautiful the image.

In another study at the University of Texas at Austin, researchers recorded a large number of cue words using DALL-E 2 to generate images that were as strange as a 'magic spell'.

Take these two unexplained phrases, for example.

1. Apoploe vesrreaitais (hereinafter referred to as Phrase 1)

2. Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons (hereinafter referred to as Phrase 2)

It's true, I don't know what it means, and even translation software can be confused in the same place.

But in DALL-E's case, Phrase 1 stands for "bird" and Phrase 2 stands for "bug / pest". If you tell DALL-E "Phrase 1 eat Phrase 2", you get a diagram that looks like this

Now you can understand why prompts are compared to "mantras" - words that don't know what they are saying, but which correspond to some internal logic of the system.

On the whole, the hints are somewhat quick to meet the "need". But there's a lot of skill involved in playing with these AI's, and for the lazy, buying hints on platforms like PromptBase is a lot less complicated.

Is selling prompts for money a viable business model?

Let's get serious about buying and selling prompts.

Many researchers and enthusiasts, mainly DALL・E, have previously published free resources for hints for popular AI systems.

As one of the first companies to commercialise cues, PromptBase has been controversial. In fact, there is an ongoing debate within the AI community about which research should or could be commercialised.

Selling prompts does not violate any AI provider's terms of service, and no one can stop PromptBase customers from using purchased prompts.

However, because of the ethical and legal issues behind it, there is no shortage of people who see it as a Pandora's box that should not be opened.