Behind every great AI-generated image is a great prompt. And a brand new online game lets you guess it.
Find The Prompt is a fun, missing-letter game that captures the AI zeitgeist. Like Wordle, you only get one prompt a day, but unlike Wordle, you have to guess a string of words that were used to create the AI-generated image on the page. French entrepreneur Nicolas LeRoux launched the game last week as a way to pull back the curtain on a process that is often obscured from the public. “For people who aren’t programmers or digital artists but just curious about how it works, it’s a way to understand that someone wrote this prompt and it generated the image,” says LeRoux.
LeRoux says there are two kinds of AI artists: those who keep their prompt to themselves, and those who post them on aggregator sites like Prompt Hero or Playground AI. This is where he sources the images and associated prompts.
The game interface consists of one image and a string of boxed-up letters. As one player pointed out on Twitter, “the letters look like one of those serial killer letters stitched together from magazine cutouts.” One day, you might be served a short prompt about an “old Arab man wearing a turban dancing in a Turkish mosque.” The next, you may have to work your way through a string of adjectives like a “tiny cute and adorable piglet adventurer dressed in a warm overcoat with survival gear on a winter day.”
LeRoux, a Sciences Po alumni, has dabbled with AI image generators like Midjourney or DALL-E, but his day job has to do with language. In 2015, he created an online website about French literature, vocabulary, and spelling called La Langue Française (the French language). Since then, he has created various quizzes and dictation games for the site, including a surprisingly addictive “spelling blitz” (in French) that encourages players to get as many right answers in a row as possible. “French grammar is really boring, no one likes it, but people discover a game and suddenly, they are spending one hour trying to avoid making mistakes,” he says. “Games can really change your perspective on things.”
For LeRoux, Find The Prompt has the similar potential to get more people to think about words and how we use them. “This game won’t revolutionize the way we see our language,” he says, “but it’s interesting to see the connection between the image and the prompt, and to reflect on the words used.”
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