Artists were once paid for their skill in drawing, sketching and painting . Now, in the age of artificial intelligence, digital artists are adding to their income in a unique way – they are selling prompts for AI tools on a slew of online marketplaces, addressing one of the biggest challenges faced by lay users — knowing the correct prompt.
Sites such as PromptBase, Ai4Prompt, Etsy, Promptrr.io and many others feature unique prompts for AI tools like Midjourney, Sora, Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, MetaAI, LumaAI, Gemini, LeonardoAI, which generate artistic AI images. However, users attempting to unlock the right image must necessarily know the correct prompts.
Italian digital artist David Sandonato started selling Midjourney prompt catalogues on PromptBase back in February 2023, and is today ranked the lead artist on the platform with a library of 4000-5000 available prompts, including daily uploads.
“It began as a side hustle, but I’m convinced that this business has big space to grow when people will realize that today 50% of the images available in the top microstock agencies can be generated in full quality with a good prompt,” Sandonato said in an email interview with ET.
Prompt engineering is the process of structuring an instruction that can be interpreted and understood by a generative AI model. It is an interface between human intent and machine output which requires special understanding of each model’s architecture, training data, tokenization method and model parameters.
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“It is a widely believed misconception that AI-generated content can replace artistic vision…but for a machine or model to produce sophisticated work of art, it needs humans to convey that intent,” said Abhishek Golecha, a Mumbai-based ad film director, fashion photographer and most recently an AI artist who has created fully AI-generated images and ad-films.
“This is where the skill of prompt engineering becomes instrumental. An artist or a prompt engineer needs to convey the minutest detail in colour hues, or design patterns, for instance,” he said.
AI artists or prompt engineers can also build their own storefronts on these AI platforms offering discounts and giveaways. Users can also request custom prompt support from a creator of their choice. PromptBase also enables users to create an app to generate AI stickers, gifs, images or videos.
Typically, each (AI prompt) platform has a unique payout policy. For instance, Promptrr.io secures 20% of sales commissions and releases payout to creators once their account balance reaches a minimum threshold of $50. For PromptBase, this threshold is $30.
PromptBase, Ai4Prompt, Etsy and Promptrr.io did not reply to ET’s query till press time on Friday
Volatile market
Sandonato estimates that his earnings from the PromptBase marketplace added 30-40% to his monthly income, initially. However, it began to decline due to competition from prompt engineers trying to take a piece of the cake.
He pointed out that AI is already disrupting the microstock industry dominated by agencies like Shutterstock, AdobeStock, Dreamstime as images licensed by them can be fully generated by AI.
“After more than a decade of success in that field (as a vector illustrator), which let me sell more than a million of stock images, I realised that the market had started to be less profitable when the first AI image generators were presented to the public,” he said.
Closer home in India, AI solutions firms are providing tools for businesses to accelerate ideation, creation, and content generation across areas such as marketing, education, graphic designs, gaming, fashion and interior décor.
“AI marketplaces are a goldmine of resources just waiting to be discovered,” said Sreeraman Thiagarajan, founder and chief executive of Agrahyah Technologies, which works on top language and diffusion models,
“ There are thousands of marketplaces which sell website themes from $10 to $30 on an average, ( this)hastens the process to get a custom website, but one still needs a web designer. But the process is 20x faster and 10x cheaper,” he noted.
If an individual’s creative imagination is limited, shopping on AI marketplaces can expand that horizon while also reducing time spent on mundane tasks. That is, if a user has the right prompt.
