The Prompt Engineer Is the Artist of Our Age (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)

Danny Oppenheimer argues that prompt engineering should be seen as a new artistic medium rather than a threat to human creativity. Drawing a parallel to how photography initially seemed to “kill” painting but instead liberated it into Impressionism, Cubism and Surrealism, he suggests that crafting prompts for large language models and other generative AIs is becoming a form of expression: iterative, skillful, and collaborative. A well‑crafted prompt can coax nuance, surprise and aesthetic judgment from models in ways a blunt query cannot, making the prompt itself a creative gesture akin to choosing a brush or composing a score. Technically and culturally, this reframes authorship and workflow: creators already train models on personal voices, publish prompts alongside works, and use LLMs for research, editing and ideation—blurring who or what “wrote” a piece. Oppenheimer notes real‑world examples (AI art museums, musicians using AI‑trained voices, hybrid poetry) and acknowledges serious risks—labor displacement, plagiarism, deepfakes and bias—that require governance. His takeaway: AI amplifies possibilities when treated as a collaborator and medium; the productive route is to elevate prompt craft and regulation, not fear the tool’s existence.