Ask HN: Why don't AI artists show their prompts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why don't AI artists show their prompts?

7 pointslabrador13 comments

When I started working with LLMs a few months ago everyone shared their prompts in a spirit of discovery. Now that I'm trying out image generation it seems no one shares their prompts. It's almost like open source prompts vs. proprietary prompts.

Fortunately I found a work around. Google Reverse Image search allows me to nail down the style fairly accurately. For example, I was able to find the style of one image to accurately duplicate the style as "Futuristic Art Deco Design with Cubism, Neo-Classicism, and the work of Italian Mannerists" in just a couple of minutes.

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I don't know the exact reason, but when they don't share the process or prompt, it seems like they're trying to gatekeep their results – which is very ironic from someone using a tool made possible by ingesting other people's work without their consent.

I agree with this. If they know some secret sauce, it'd be nice if they passed it on like the Chat LLM people do.

There are FaceBook groups that share their prompts.

What I have discovered is many of my best results on Midjourney are due to the chaos option, which makes them not consistently reproducible.

I've learned a few tricks that I guard jealously, which I almost laugh at myself about, but it's the same feeling of guarding nice little areas in nature that I discover and don't want other people trampling. Silly but all too human.

They often do, embedded in the PNG as metadata.

Otherwise its just inconvenient. Its easier to share without the prompt.

Also prompting is trickier with model like SDXL that have seperate content and style prompting. Users often dont even know the full prompt.

I'm willing to bet 99% of AI artists aren't even aware that's a thing.

Because LLMs are in a hype cycle right now, and the only thing differentiating one "AI artist" from another is the prompts they use, as opposed to actual skill or talent. Many "AI artists" wants to desperately cling to the illusion that they have something of real value to offer a potential LLM driven market rather than a text editor full of artist names and styles and seed values.

But I have seen some artists on Instagram who share their seeds, and there are sites like Civitai where people will list them.

My assumption was that in a lot of cases, they just simply forgot/didn't bother documenting their process (including more than just prompts).

You can use `interrogate clip` to reverse engineer the prompt. It's part of stable diffusion webui or you can even access it here (haven't tested this one):

https://huggingface.co/spaces/pharmapsychotic/CLIP-Interroga...

It's their only competitive advnatage if they want to make money off their "AI art".

Some do. It's often fairly non-sensical and technical - the result of hacking around to get results now regardless of long term logic.

same reason why music producers rarely share their samples. they want to keep the secret sauce....or avoid getting sued, or something similar. Also - to keep "mystery"

"why don't coca cola reveal step by step it's recipe?"

Like I said, they're not that hard to reverse engineer so you might as well just give them up

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