Distant Reading Textual AI Art Prompts

AI-based image generation using natural language prompts has become popular, catalyzed by free online services. This novel creative process thus takes place in a public space and it is possible to collect the input strings at large scale. This poster explores the structure, vocabulary and overlap with art historical image descriptions that is to be found in a collection of millions of unique prompts. We describe our digital process and the challenges posed by this peculiar category of text.