The Prompt Battle is a game show format with audience involvement that questions the meaning of prompt engineering in a playful and critical way.

The Prompt Battle was developed together with students at the Faculty of Design at HTW Dresden. Based on the format of the Rap Battle, 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. Can creativity actually be automated? Is prompt engineering really is the future-proof key capability that some believe it to be? And do you have what it takes to become a prompt engineer?

The goal of the Prompt Battle Workshop is to think through these questions together by developing and exploring new prompt engineering tasks in order to reflect on the implications of text-to-image tools for art and design.

August 31, 2023, 14:00 – 17:00
POSTCITY, Lecturehall

September 1, 2023, 14:00 – 17:00
POSTCITY, Lecturehall

hosted by Florian A. Schmidt