Prompt

What is the network that sustains this object?

• How does it move from person to person, person to software, to platform, what things are attached to it (visual culture)
• Networks of attachments
• How does it relate / sustain a collective? (human + non-human)

Prompts can be shared or kept private. Help others to reproduce. Economy of sharing. List of best prompts and tutorials. Groups of people with same interest in CivitAI.

How does it evolve through time?

Evolution of the interface for these objects. Early chatgpt offered two parameters through the API: prompt and temperature. Today extremely complex object with all kinds of components and parameters. Visually what is the difference? Richness of the interface in decentralization (the more options, the better...). Ye the prompt remains very central. Break from previous experiments with GANs which remained confined to a technically skilled audience. Promise of democratization.

Diverging tendencies in the ways users are invited to prompts in AI systems. One philosophy is to ask as little as possible from the user. With only a few words, the user get what they supposedly want. The system has to make up for all the bits that are missing, context, etc. This involves prompt augmentation on the server side. Also a lot of implicit assumptions.

The other approach is to give the user all the means to prompt as an expert. Prompt expansion is visible to the user, providing tools to improve the prompt, offer context, continuous chat, etc. Image generation in Stable Horde is stateless. Meaning that every prompt is considered in isolation. The system can't infer anything from past prompts, no concepts of sessions. Much harder to create this sense of continuity than with a centralized service such as OpenAI's chatGPT.

Evolution of prompting in Flux models. They integrate the advances in LLMs to add a more refined semantic understanding of the prompt.

(When does the negative prompt appear? )

How does it create value? Or decrease / affect value?

The quality of a model is evaluated to how well it responds to prompts. Prompt adherence.

What is its place/role in techno cultural strategies?

Humour, political critique or political hegemony. Trumpian visual politics is written through prompts.

• 
  Image generated with the prompt Man washing the dishes
• 
  Image generated with the prompt Man washing the dishes

How does it relate to autonomous infrastructure?

The prompt becomes related to autonomous infrastructure through the practice of annotating LoRAs for instance. LoRA's annotation is a form of pre-prompting, embedding prompts in the model. Thinking about images infrastructurally. Not for one image but for a whole genre or character.