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

Firstly, there is the issue of information leakage.

Studies have shown that language systems trained on large amounts of public data (such as GPT-3) can "leak" more personal information, including names and addresses, when certain prompts are entered.

Furthermore, if DALL-E 2 is prompted to generate a "3D model of a Pokémon", this inevitably involves infringement of Nintendo's rights.

The researchers also speculated that DALL-E 2's "spell" could bypass its banned words filter to generate images that would otherwise be prohibited, such as violent images.

As well, while PromptBase has said it will scrutinise to ensure that prompts do not violate any 'AI generation rules', the level of scrutiny may be difficult to maintain if business grows and the market expands.

Vagrant Gautam, a computational linguist at Saarland College in Germany, also believes that the commercialisation of hints could lead to hint abuse.

At the same time, she feels that it is a double-edged sword. After all, hints can be sold for money, and people who are tech-savvy can get their side hustle going.

"The commercialisation of prompts points to the importance of prompt engineering and the skills needed for creativity, time-consuming, adversarial thinking and so on," Gautam says.

Users' complaints about the commercialisation of prompts have focused on the low number of free tweaks to prompts.

But on second thought, people have to take this iterative, adversarial approach to figure out how to push the generative model to do what they "need".