Come with me and you’ll see a world of pure imagination — Willy Wonka
Intro
In the near future you will be looking to hire a new type of thought worker(or potentially see this skill as often as ‘proficient at excel’ on resumes). This up and coming talent is known as “prompt engineering” and it is time everyone started the discussion and using this amazing new tool.
Huh, Say what?
Prompt engineering/hacking/designing is the practice of crafting Text-to-Image prompts in a way that to create consistent, useable, high quality images for others to use. Text-to-Image is the latest generation of AI which lets users provide a “prompt” similar to a search engine. Unlike a search engine, the images created are completely generated from the engines models “imagination”. The more accurate the prompt, the quicker and more accurate the results are. To be clear, the AI is not searching a database of images to find the closest matches; everything is generated from latent space, in real time. From your mind, to the prompt, to a never before seen creation. You are not constrained by physics, reality, your artistic ability, software licenses, etc, etc, etc. Think it and it comes into existence. Prompt engineering is the art of tuning the words, weights, and perspective into what a customer actually wanted. This technology is not limited to 2d images and is rapidly evolving to AR/VR and everything in between.
“How could a business possible use this?”
Lets talk clip art. There is an unusually large market on the internet for art that can be used in presentations. Businesses pay large amounts for clean professional images that capture the idea they are trying to convey. If I want a clipart coffee cup, a quick google search brings up their best options with various licensing fees and usage rights. Using prompt engineering skills we can generate a basic(ugly) object with relative ease:
This prompt created a useable, image that at least gives the general IDEA of a flat art coffee cup. With a little prompt engineering magic we can produce a much better image:
And since this is a computer program running in the background we can add some spice to the prompt to make it capable of generating many more items in the same style.
Building A Metaverse Business Model
Having a prompt one person can use is good. I want more.
So, how can others benefit from (or pay me for) my newly found creative skills? There is a service called “prompt base” which is an emerging market place for prompts. Since we are hoping to push the frontier, this article calls for a bit more…. pizzazz 😁.
I’ll spare the exact details in this post, however, I created an ERC-1155 NFT token on OpenSea which will allow me to create unique assets with unlockable content. Instead of a picture of a monkey, I will allow up to 500 users to purchase the NFT and the owners can reveal the prompt without me ever having to be involved. When a customer buys my prompts they are not buying 1 unique image, they are buying the ability to generate endless variations of my prompt’s styled objects with anything they want(🤯). Bought it for office art, use it to make cars or sunglasses. If they decide to resell their access, I will get 2% of any future trades. At the time of writing this I am offering these custom prompts for ~$1.50 worth of crypto coin. These are also carbon neutral NFTs, the code sits on Polygon network(a L2 for ETH) and the transfer fees are almost non-existent.
Lets do more…. As a prompt engineer I need to drive traffic to my new store, so customers can sample the quality of the products first hand. I have seen others using Spatial.io for their NFT collections and I think this is the perfect opportunity to set up my shop and let the world know we’re open for business. Spatial is a virtual world platform where users can interact with each other, share experiences, showcase art & NFTs.
From zero to a metaverse business in a few hours worth of time. No coding, the future is amazing. Check out The Collection here!
Dive in 🏊♀!
Ready to start the journey down the rabbit hole? The engines are available to the public and most are free to use with a paid model once you get hooked
Engines:
- Dall-e — https://labs.openai.com/
- Stable diffusion — https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion
- MidJourney — https://www.midjourney.com/app/
Market place:
- Promptbase — https://promptbase.com/
- [Designer]prompts — https://opensea.io/collection/designer-prompts
How-to:
- Prompt book — https://dallery.gallery/the-dalle-2-prompt-book/