How AI Can Prompt Your Inner Artist
About a year ago, I was a member of a Facebook group about a relatively obscure part of computer science called “procedural generation.” People would mostly write their own programs that created interesting visuals. Then, in early 2022, a program called Disco Diffusion was released, and all hell broke loose. It allowed anybody to create breathtaking images just by typing in a description, called a “prompt.” Soon the internet was awash with artificial intelligence-generated art, with a new AI image-generation program seeming to be released every few weeks. From DALL-E 2 to Midjourney, easy-interface programs were quickly accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
This line of reasoning is based on creative destruction.
People were so excited about these programs because the output was. As a cognitive scientist in creating visualization models with AI that unpack how the mind processes information, I’ve been playing with these programs, and I can attest to the democratizing effect. I’ve formed hundreds of images, almost entirely for the pleasure of simply looking at them. Once, I made a series of paintings based on Pac-Man that I was pretty
