Reverse Artisteering

#AiPRIL (Post 12/30) 30 days of testing, reflecting and posting about Ai every day in April.

Today I want to introduce the concept of "Reverse Artisteering". We all know about "Reverse Engineering" (ie "a process through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accomplishes a task with very little (if any) insight into exactly how it does so.").

But now we also have "Reverse Artisteering".

Thanks to sites like Midjourney you can now go in and see prompts that others use to understand how they created the art that they did.

You can then also, of course, copy all - or parts - of those descriptions to help you create a similar result.

And with the new feature of "/describe" you can take ANY image (!) and upload it to Midjourney to find out what prompt the AI would have used to create that image!

For my experiment I uploaded a screenshot of "The Starry Night" and asked the Ai to give me examples of what I should have written in order to get a similar result. I got this:

I then took that description and, after slightly editing it, uploaded a photo of my island and asked Midjourney to create an image inspired by my island, but in the style of "The Starry Night" (based on the description it had given me before).

Suddenly I had a van Gogh inspired picture of my island created by me, but without me having to know anything about prompting in order to create it.

"Reverse Artisteering - a process through which one understands and gets insights, through clues and descriptions, how a previously made artwork was created in order to be able to create similar, or inspired, works of art."

I can think of very few creative arenas that are more inclusive, more open or more educational than how Midjourney is helping people understand how to create the right prompts by showing which prompts people are using, and now also helping to explain how to describe a prompt correctly by just uploading the image you were inspired by.

** Ai: If you are not blown away you are not paying attention **