Pablo Delcan allows everyone to become a non-AI artist with community project Prompt Brush 2.0

Pablo Delcan was sick of AI. More than that, he was sick of the artistic laziness that leads to generative models and the instant gratification of conjuring images with zero effort. Even one per cent of effort would be fine. So, he created Prompt Brush, an online project and later a book of illustrations where he himself was the image generator, taking prompts from people that would otherwise be fed into a data bank. Pablo became a non-AI artist and non-Dall-E designer.

But what started as an innocent joke on social media turned into a queue of over a 1000 prompts and naturally, Pablo realised the full potential of the project, so he opened it up to similarly pissed-off artists who want to make a small (and often silly) difference. Prompt Brush 2.0 is a free to use, open to all website that allows the same process of feeding prompting to a real-life artist, but now anyone can illustrate the prompts – and the site has become a bit of wholesome treasure trove of wish fulfilment.

It makes sense for Pablo to share the ask with his following and invite them in on the process. He’s a designer, artist and teacher – and he’s not against digital tools, in fact he teaches a class about them. But when people begin to ignore what they are capable of and allow machine work to prevail, that can become an issue. Indolence isn’t innovation. Opening Prompt Brush up to an eager artistic community is proof of that.

“You pick a prompt someone wrote, you draw it, the person who wrote it receives it. I feel like I got so much from this exercise of drawing things for other people that I was curious and excited to see if other people might get something out of it too,” says Pablo. “A drawing made by a person for another person feels like a small good thing right now.”

Whereas AI ‘art’ typically revolves around pumping out imagery that is photo-realistic, Pablo’s style is the absolute opposite, the definition of care-free doodling. For Prompt Brush 2.0, the website offers a minimal array of tools for artists to use for their little masterpieces – most of them, due to the black lines, white page and small canvas, end up looking like spiritual successors of Pablo’s first iteration of the project. The prompts are better than ever too, with some calling for puffer fish on podcasts and T-Rexes with birthday hats. Even the most innocuous prompts, such as ‘test’ or ‘moon’ are imaginatively visualised by artists looking to subvert your expectations. There’s no prescription for how to draw and that’s how Pablo likes it: “The coherence comes from that, not from a filter or a way to go about drawing things. A blank page and a black brush. That’s it.”