I've been following the artist Pablo Declan ever since I saw and loved his cover for the combined edition of The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf—so a little before the Prompt-Brush 1.0 project. I watched him post the call on Instagram for us to submit our art request prompts to him instead of to Dall-E and he would become the human AI artist. It was such a cute and funny project and I loved seeing him post so many of the prompts and his drawings in his IG Story.

The book is a curation of some of the drawings he made and their accompanying prompts, and it's all very clever and fun and resembles something like The Far Side meets Postsecret meets the green category in Pictionary. Some of the prompts are personal ("Can you show me my future?") while others are more straightforward ("the most beautiful lawnmower"), but every accompanying drawing is surprising and shows a sense of humor and creativity (a gravestone and a lawnmower with a face of makeup, respectively). My favorite prompts were "I hate my job," "a picture is worth 1000 words," and "look at my eyes," and I won't spoil the drawings 😉.

My only hangup is that I feel like the book will mostly appeal to people who are staunchly anti-AI, but the book ends with a little Q&A between the author and a chatbot where he admits that he feels the "opposite of" "fighting against" AI and viewed this project as mostly an exercise in creativity, which might annoy the type of person who is drawn to the book because they view its concept as resistance.