What should we call images that look like photographs taken with a camera but that were in fact generated by artificial intelligence?
One answer is promptography, a word proposed by Peruvian photographer Christian Vinces and popularized by Berlin-based artist Boris Eldagsen. It’s a portmanteau of prompt—an instruction given by a human to an AI tool—and photography.
Eldagsen has been in the news lately because in March he won, and then rejected, a prestigious Sony World Photography Award for his black-and-white image titled “PSEUDOMNESIA: The Electrician.”
Pseudomnesia: The Electrician (cropped). See full-size image. Eldgasen writes: “Pseudomnesia is the classic Greek term for a pseudo memory, a fake memory, such as a spurious recollection of events that never took place, as opposed to a memory that is merely inaccurate.”
In refusing the prize, Eldagsen revealed that he’d created the image not with a camera but with an artificial-intelligence tool, DALL-E 2. “I applied as a cheeky monkey, to find out if the competitions are prepared for AI to enter,” Eldagsen wrote on his website in a post dated April 13. “They are not.”
In an interview published on April 21 in Scientific American, Eldagsen said he was hooked on AI “from the very beginning. For me, as an artist, AI generators are absolute freedom. It’s like the tool I have always wanted. I was always working from my imagination as a photographer, and now the material I work with is knowledge. And if you are older, it’s a plus, because you can put all your knowledge into prompting and creating images.”
His Pseudomnesia series was prompted, so to speak, by his discovery of photographs his father, who’d been a German soldier in World War II, had left behind. “I started to collect images from the forties at flea markets, and also on eBay, but didn’t know what to do with them. So my first experiment was: Can I recreate images of that time using AI?”
#Promptography is not #photography: from Eldagsen.com
The answer is obviously yes. But “AI is not photography,” Eldagsen insisted in his rejection of the Sony prize. “AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this. They are different entities.”
Like many supposed neologisms, promptography isn’t entirely neo. “Prompt” has been used for years by photographers to mean “an instruction to the subject of a photograph.” A Facebook group called Promptography was created six years ago “for discussing prompts that will elicit emotion and reactions from clients in order to capture them on camera.” The website Promptographer.com offers “free photo prompts for photographers”; according to the Whois database, the domain was registered in January 2020. (The plural form, Promptographers.com, was just registered, on April 23, 2023, and may turn out to be AI-related.)
What’s new, of course, is the AI sense of “prompt,” which involves talking to a machine rather than to humans.
So is the new promptography a good thing or a bad thing? Eldagsen sees both sides: “As an artist, I just love it,” he told Scientific American. “As a citizen, I’m deeply concerned.”
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Related:
My July 2022 post about the renaming of DALL·E mini, an AI-powered image generator.
My January 2023 post about prompt engineering.
My Medium story “Can you create brand names with ChatGPT?”
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