Prompt Battle

The Prompt Battle is a game show format with audience involvement that questions the meaning of prompt engineering in a playful and critical way. Based on the format of the Rap Battle, eight candidates compete against each other under time pressure on stage in a tournament to solve image and text tasks set for them. The audience decides who has won after each round. The rounds are interrupted by video interludes that illuminate the implications of text-to-image tools from different perspectives. The aim of the Prompt Battle is to address the numerous controversial questions that tools such as DALL·E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney raise for professional creatives. Questions about the origin of training data, the value of creative work, the inflation of images, and the intellectual property of the content produced. Since 2022, rapid technological advances in the field of AI-generated content have raised a series of fundamental questions. For artists and designers, the first question is whether creativity can really be automated, and whether prompt engineering really is the future-proof key capability that some believe it to be. Behind the hype, far-reaching ethical, economic, copyright and aesthetic challenges and contradictions are emerging. The Prompt Battle uses the game show format to address these questions in a playful way by confronting the candidates and the audience with prompt engineering tasks tailored to the occasion. The original Prompt Battle was developed at HTW Dresden by Sebastian Schmieg, Florian A. Schmidt, Bernadette Geiger, Robert Hellwig, Emily Krause, Levi Stein, Lina Schwarzenberg and Ella Zickerick.