# No Longer Trending on Artstation: Prompt Analysis of Generative AI Art

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14425 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14425/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 16 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14896/) (2022)
- [Easily Accessible Text-to-Image Generation Amplifies Demographic Stereotypes at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03759/) (2022)
- [Design Guidelines for Prompt Engineering Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06977/) (2021)
- [Social Biases through the Text-to-Image Generation Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06034/) (2023)
- [How well can Text-to-Image Generative Models understand Ethical Natural Language Interventions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15230/) (2022)
- [Best Prompts for Text-to-Image Models and How to Find Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11711/) (2022)
- [A Prompt Log Analysis of Text-to-Image Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04587/) (2023)
- [Navigating Cultural Chasms: Exploring and Unlocking the Cultural POV of Text-To-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01929/) (2023)
- [Is Writing Prompts Really Making Art?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13049/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [StyleShot: A Snapshot on Any Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01414/) (2024)
- [Civiverse: A Dataset for Analyzing User Engagement with Open-Source Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15261/) (2024)
- [Exploring Language Patterns of Prompts in Text-to-Image Generation and Their Impact on Visual Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14125/) (2025)
- [Data-Driven Analysis of Text-Conditioned AI-Generated Music: A Case Study with Suno and Udio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11824/) (2025)
- [The Art That Poses Back: Assessing AI Pastiches after Contemporary Artworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06324/) (2026)
- [Artworks Reimagined: Exploring Human-AI Co-Creation through Body Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05476/) (2024)
- [When Discourse Stalls: Moving Past Five Semantic Stopsigns about Generative AI in Design Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08565/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image generation using generative AI is rapidly becoming a major new source of visual media, with billions of AI generated images created using diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney over the last few years. In this paper we collect and analyse over 3 million prompts and the images they generate. Using natural language processing, topic analysis and visualisation methods we aim to understand collectively how people are using text prompts, the impact of these systems on artists, and more broadly on the visual cultures they promote. Our study shows that prompting focuses largely on surface aesthetics, reinforcing cultural norms, popular conventional representations and imagery. We also find that many users focus on popular topics (such as making colouring books, fantasy art, or Christmas cards), suggesting that the dominant use for the systems analysed is recreational rather than artistic.