Prompt Culture: From Lines to Surfaces in AI Image Generation

This article introduces ‘prompt culture’ as an emergent ecosystem at the intersection of artificial intelligence, language, market economy, and visual culture. Drawing on Vilém Flusser’s hybrid scholarship, this study seeks to make a theoretical contribution to the field of AI critical studies by positioning prompt culture between textual sequences and visual simultaneity. While Flusser observed that lines (text) historically emerged to interpret surfaces (images), prompt culture represents an unprecedented inversion, allowing texts to generate images through ‘technical images’: visual outputs that signify concepts rather than phenomena. The article maps prompt culture’s multidimensional ecosystem across four interconnected domains: divergent professional practices among prompt engineers and artistic creators; markets and industries evolving around prompts; linguistic and rhetorical dimensions of prompting as an inverted ekphrasis; and creation of ‘hyper-technical images’, technical images of technical images. This article establishes a theoretical foundation for understanding how AI image generation technologies reshape relationships between textual and visual meaning-making.