The Art of the Prompt: How You Can Make Money Selling AI Ideas

“I just sold 3 prompt per Midjourney for $125. It’s not much, but for me it’s the beginning of a new job”.

Let’s start with this sentence, written by a user on Twitterwhich seems to offer new opportunities to whoever wants to make a living using artificial intelligence.

And let’s try to explain, to begin with, what the two most difficult words mean.

Prompt
In summary, is an instruction/command. This term is used, in the context of AI and in particular of Natural Language Processing (NLP) – i.e. natural language processing – to describe the set of (textual) commands that a user uses to ask an AI to write a text or create an image. The prompt must include all the characteristics that will guide the AI to produce the content a user wants, just as he imagined it in his head.

Midjourney

It is one of the most used algorithms, at the moment, for the so-called text-to-image: create images from a user’s text. Midjourney can be used through the social platform Discord. Users enter a prompt and after a few minutes they get the desired image.

Good. Now we can go back to the opening sentence, the Twitter user excited to have discovered a new jobdefinitely lucrative.

We don’t know if this person was telling the truth, or is simply calling attention to Musk’s platform. We can tell you, however, that a “prompt market” really does exist. In fact, more than one actually.

Paraphrasing the most popular title in modern manuals, write a prompt it’s simple if you know how to do it.

Those approaching AI for the first time, or those who read ChatGpt casually, are most likely convinced that artificial intelligence does everything by itself. Starting with a simple and succinct question. But this practically never happens. Who asks ChatGpt “Write a novel” won’t get a bestseller and nowhere near what he had in mind.

The same goes for the creating images or videos. We learned this by telling the story of Fabio Comparellithe self-taught Italian who created a video with AI – The Evolution of Man – seen millions of times on Twitter. When we interviewed him, to understand how he created that clip, he explained it to us in great detail, underlining the hundreds of instructions and modifications which he had to give and carry out himself. But the most significant sentence of him, regarding what is discussed in this article, was: “I also show you my prompts, but please do not divulge them”.

History

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The reason is clear. The ‘instructions’ that are given to Midjourney – but also to similar algorithms such as those of Dall-E and Stable Diffusion – I am as precious as the final result. In short, prompts are the essential ingredients for creating a subject or an object defining the style with which it will be depicted, the context in which it will be found, the light that will invest it, the final image ratio. And so on. The richer this description, the better the results.

Let’s take an example using one of the many tweets that include AI-generated images:

Clicking su “Everything”on each of the four images in this tweet, you can read the prompt the author used to generate them. To obtain similar images, perhaps using another subject, it will be sufficient copy and paste all other prompt elements. If desired, the prompt can also be enriched. But users quickly realized that getting inspired by an already made prompt, and using its elements, is much easier than creating one completely new.

Based on this common sentiment, sites were soon born – and even Google Docs sheets – which collect the most successful experiments, and in any case lots of free references to generate beautiful images.

PromptHero, for example, is a database that allows you to consult ‘millions’ of artistic images created by AI models such as Midjourney, Dall-E and Stable Diffusion”. Each of these images includes its prompt and an icon, ‘Copy’, which you can click to copy it in a second. You really are spoiled for choice and all of these instructions are free.

Among prompt artisthowever, there are some better than others. Or more inclined to transform this skill – which is starting to get very close to programming – into a business.

It was born for this PromptBase, a marketplace where you can sell (but also buy) prompts. Hundreds are added every hour, with prices ranging from $1.99 to $4.99.

Who thinks that two dollars is a disproportionate amount, for a job that in theory gets a car done, should reflect that prompt makers are not selling a simple string of prompts. In many cases, they sell an idea and (then) its realization.

As one Twitter user rightly observed, writing a prompt is sometimes very laborious and complex, as these examples demonstrate:

If you haven’t been playing with generative AI to make images, you may not appreciate how much of the process of developing the image you want is iterative and experimental

Here are some examples of complex prompts & outcomes (All from the MidJourney multiprompt public Discord) pic.twitter.com/0mff4rvPtv

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) January 9, 2023

The prompt writer’s talent is ultimately largely determined by his imagination. As in this case:

And it is no coincidence that a user on Twitter candidly suggests asking 5-year-olds for ideas for prompts, perhaps during a family dinner, to take advantage of their vivid imaginations:

The problem, if anything, lies in the copyright of a prompt. PromptBase reserves the right to approve all submissions, but how can you tell that these sentences of text belong to whoever intends to sell them, and that they have not been stolen from othersmaybe to users who shared them for free on another platform?

And how can the authors of a prompt be sure that a buyer will not use their ‘code’, selling or sharing it elsewhere?

These are questions to which there is no answer yet, because the prompt market is in its infancy and lack of adequate regulation. Just as it does not appear regulated the pool of images from which the various AIs drawas evidenced by the lawsuits brought by those who own the rights to millions of images (Getty Images, for example).

The case

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This doesn’t seem to be a problem at the moment for PromptBase, which earns 20% on every transaction that takes place on the platform. 80%, on the other hand, goes to the author of the sold prompt. Same speech for Visualise.aiwhich, however, in addition to the paid prompts, also offers many free ones.

We are probably really faced with the birth of a new profession. Artists o prompt engineers, it is not clear what we will call them, but these will (soon) be the profiles also sought after by companies. And who can claim such expertise, on your CV, will certainly have one more argument to convince a hypothetical employer. Writing a prompt, in the future, will be equivalent to someone who, today, still indicates on their curriculum that they are able to use the Office package.

But it’s so hard create, from scratch, an image with AI?

Actually you can get them decent results without being particularly creative. That’s the beauty of using an artificial intelligence different from those of the past: the new AIs are ‘generative’therefore able to imitate and expand the creativity of a human being to create new, surprising artifacts.

We take as a reference Midjourney. There are some basic instructions which, at first glance, may seem incomprehensible and which, once assimilated, are applied almost automatically to each prompt.

Some examples:

/imagine is the command that must necessarily be typed in order to enter a prompt

–creative asks the algorithm to dare and push creativity to the max

— stylize [seguito da un valore che va da 1 a 1000] accentuates the style chosen by the user

–no [seguito da un’indicazione] allows you to exclude a particular element from the image that will be generated

–q [seguito da un valore da 1 a 5] will indicate the quality of the image to be obtained

— ar it is important because it indicates “aspect ratio”, i.e. the proportions of an image and is of particular interest to those who want to generate square images, for example, or 16:9

In short, these are some of the basic commands. To which new elements can be added from time to time. There is also a manual that helps i newbie, novice users in short, to make the most of Midjourney. But those who don’t want to study can always resort to tools like Promptomania, which guides the user to the prompt closest to the idea in his head.

The most fascinating part of this new ‘formation’, is that we proceed by trial and error. The AI, even if guided, it is completely unpredictable when it generates new images. Users still have to intervene several times, perhaps asking Midjourney to retouch, using another prompt, a newly generated image.

In short, several steps are often needed to arrive at an optimal result. And if you consider that free attempts are limited – 25 for each user on Midjourney, then you have to pay – then you’ll understand why it’s so essential have the right prompt right away. An (almost) infallible code, already tested by another user, allows you to save time and above all ‘credits’.

The Art of the Prompt: How You Can Make Money Selling AI Ideas

Without knowing it, an Italian graphic designer has disturbed the Web with a video on human evolution

Does Generative AI Infringe Copyright? The 2 reasons why Getty sues Stable Diffusion

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