Ariadna Arnés and Eric Dufourd. Promptographers, creators of AI-generated creative imagery ✨

“A change is already here, and professional photographers will sell our cameras in less than two years” ⚡

“Creativity is human. The machine itself is not creative in photography. A camera isn’t either” 🧠

“Maybe weddings and some types of portraits will survive AI. Photojournalism? It’s going to struggle” 📸

“It will be the wild world of millions and millions of daily AI images, completely ephemeral” 🌪️

“We must all develop a critical mindset at all times. To decide whether what you’re seeing is true” 🔍

Ariadna Arnés (Barcelona, 1976) is a photographer and visual creator, one of the most relevant figures in artificial intelligence in Catalonia. Eric Dufourd (Nantes, 1974) is an AI creative director. Both are promptographers, meaning photographers without a camera who work through textual instructions using the AI application Midjourney. They have presented a conference at the IA Hub Barcelona, in the 22@ district, that invites audiences to dream.

Is there interest in how AI photography is made?

Eric Dufourd: People are interested in anything new, and AI is so powerful that there’s great curiosity to learn more.

Who is the audience? Photographers or people who use AI to make images?

Ariadna Arnés: There’s a bit of everything. Curious people and people from the advertising world. Creatives in general who are interested in understanding our work and how we do it.

And what are you? Photographers who fell in love with AI as a way to envision your professional future?

Eric: No, I’m an interior designer. I try to express what I have in my head, and the truth is I’m not a photographer at all. I never knew how a camera worked. I never knew how to take good photos. I don’t have the eye.

Ariadna: That’s a gift you can learn, too. It can be trained.

But how did you get into this and end up becoming an AI creative director?

Eric: Three years ago I started experimenting. I had heard that generative AI could create incredible images. I was interested in incorporating this new technology into my work as an interior designer. I tried DALL·E from OpenAI, but truthfully I gave it up because I wasn’t very satisfied.

Ariadna: My case is different. I am a photographer.

You come from analog and digital photography, right?

Ariadna: Yes—analog, digital, mobile, and now AI. Fortunately, all four interested me enough to invest time in understanding the tools. AI especially, because it opened up a world of possibilities in creativity, imagination, and transforming images that look real but are not. It’s like a blank canvas that has ignited my creativity, something that didn’t happen before with a camera because it limited me somewhat to reality. In this field, everything remains to be done and invented.

You used to do reportage. Thanks to AI, are you now making surrealist photography?

Ariadna: Yes. I’ve stepped into a world of magical realism that I like on a personal creative level. Now I try to apply all that knowledge and aesthetic to other types of commissions, such as book covers or a project for La Vanguardia of impossible interviews by generating characters who were already dead. The editorial world will open its doors to AI. It’s taking longer for the press, especially, to introduce these tools in newsrooms. I understand it, because it requires careful thought. I feel everything remains to be done, and everything is moving very fast.

Eric started with OpenAI’s DALL·E. Did you start directly with Midjourney?

Ariadna: No, I also started with DALL·E, but the results didn’t interest me much. I thought: “If I can search this on Google, what’s the point of doing it here?” A few months later I saw the work of a girl using Midjourney. She made portraits of girls with invented animals, with a very refined aesthetic. Very beautiful, very personal. I loved it. I thought: “I want to do this.” I talked to her on Twitter, she was super kind, and she explained she worked with Midjourney. I started that way and haven’t stopped for three years.

And you, Eric, when you discovered that early version of DALL·E —which has nothing to do with today’s— what evolution did you go through?

Eric: I abandoned it too. But then I moved to another way of generating images with Stable Diffusion, a program that runs locally on your computer. You can generate images based on prompts and a lot of technique behind them, with numerous adjustments. You have to know a lot, and I didn’t have the time to go deeper. When Midjourney came out, five days after Ariadna, I started generating images too. Sharing things on Twitter eventually brought us together.

Did you meet on Twitter?

Ariadna: Yes. Our paths ran in parallel.

Eric: I was doing it on my own, I was completely self-taught. I learned to make images; that’s what I liked. Creating things as realistic as possible but with a touch that allows you to say: “This isn’t real, this is AI.” That’s something Ariadna and I share.

Ariadna: We share obsessions.

Eric: Yes, we share obsessions. The same themes.

Which ones?

Ariadna: There’s one that’s very recurrent: cactus. Hugging cactus, eating them, denting them. Clouds...

You do a lot with clouds and balloons, right?

Ariadna: Yes, yes. And with plastic.

Eric: Fire.

Ariadna: We repeat a few obsessions. We feed off each other.

Do you think generating images with AI might end up changing the taste, style or aesthetics of interior design?

Eric: It’s a tool that will make the work of all interior designers easier because it will quickly generate very realistic images from references or textures. I believe in that more than in a revolution in interior design or a radically different future.

You don’t think AI will influence interior design?

Eric: There’s a world of difference between what an AI tool can create and actually manufacturing things. We can 3D-print things without a problem. But overall, I don’t think it will affect interior design.

There are limitations.

Eric: Yes, the limitation is technical, whereas in AI the only limit is imagination.

Ariadna: You can invent whatever you want, and it always generates some result, even if you ask for strange things like letters, numbers or mathematical formulas.

Do you feel you have more room to evolve or more freedom?

Ariadna: Artistically, infinite. It depends only on what I can imagine. And right now I’m unleashed. Professionally, I see a change that is already here and that photographers will sell our cameras in less than two years. There will be an incredible second-hand market of digital cameras. And maybe in a few years they’ll come back into fashion.

The Polaroid effect?

Ariadna: That will probably happen. I see the camera being replaced by AI. Not in all areas of photography, but in many. Maybe weddings and some types of portraits will survive, but in general...

And photojournalism?

Ariadna: Photojournalism as well, although it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish what is real from what isn’t. We need to develop a critical mindset every day, all the time. At every moment we’ll have to decide whether what we’re seeing is true or not. It’s becoming more extreme.

How will we do that?

Ariadna: Until there are laws regulating the use of AI or the obligation to label AI-generated images, this will be the wild world of millions and millions of daily images, completely ephemeral. With invented content, real or not real, or reinvented. Photojournalism will have a hard time. There will be a lot of intrusion too. I don’t know how they’ll handle it, but it’s clear some kind of regulation is needed. If we rely on ethics, we’re in trouble. We are ethical, but maybe most people aren’t.

In which communities do you detect less ethics?

Ariadna: It’s not about a specific community, but on Twitter I see very poor ethics. Especially in the world of news, fake news.

Eric: It always depends on how you use what’s available to you. Most people who use ChatGPT to create images try to make Trump and the usual ones.

Ariadna: It’s so easy to do that it’s very tempting. Upload your photo and tell it: “Put me hugging Madonna.” And in one minute you’re hugging Madonna. All those images start circulating and it becomes very hard to know what’s true and what’s not.

AI is only democratizing Photoshop.

Ariadna: Yes. You could already do all this before if you knew how to use the tool. Now the tool is much more accessible to everyone, but there are different ways of using it. At the level we use it, it’s like taking photos with a phone. I made a photo book with my phone, but most people use their phone to take simple snapshots. That’s what will happen with ChatGPT, Nano Banana, and all of these. In the end it’s “I’m going to make a picture of myself with Bad Bunny or whoever.”

Don’t you think AI is popularly used to generate images as a meme? Politicians to create fake news, and everyday people for fun?

Ariadna: Yes, everyday users do, but many companies are also using the technology to save money on creatives. And many are trying it and realizing it’s not the solution either. They also thought they could do without photographers when phones with cameras came out, and in the end it became clear that having a camera phone doesn’t solve everything. You need a thinking mind. A creative and aesthetic criterion with ideas and knowledge.

Could a new professional profile be emerging?

Ariadna: I think so. I want to be a promptographer. [Laughs]

Are you no longer a photographer?

Ariadna: Right now I’m both, but I’m convinced that if you ask me in five years, I’ll be more of a promptographer than a photographer.

Eric: I also imagine a daily life transformed by AI. It’s like having a personal assistant. It will do the industrial and repetitive tasks. And I imagine myself spending more time creating. That’s the five-year goal: spending time thinking of ideas and materializing them with AI.

What AI tools do you explain in your conference?

Ariadna: Mainly Midjourney, because that’s what we work with. Also, now you can make video with Midjourney. There will be moving images.

Don’t you see Midjourney threatened by Google with Nano Banana?

Ariadna: Nano Banana is very powerful. It does things Midjourney still doesn’t do, but I think it will eventually. Nano Banana is partly free.

And you can work with simpler prompts than those in Midjourney.

Ariadna: At the beginning we both started on Discord. That alone was an effort. Entering that platform you didn’t know how to use, very technical and not very user-friendly… You’re there thinking: “Where do I start?”

And anyone could grab your images?

Ariadna: Even today. In fact, Midjourney is an open platform and everything belongs to everyone. We must internalize that everything is everyone’s. It’s the jungle. And Discord is a jungle to manage.

The first barrier was Discord.

Ariadna: Yes, and learning Midjourney was the next step.

Do many interior designers do what you do, or are you a “rara avis”?

Eric: I’m not only an interior designer; I also do a lot of branding, graphic design... I look for the best tools for all the fields I can work in. Clearly there are many of us. At the agency where I work [Carré Noir], they let me train people and we’re about fifty who use AI every day to transform our craft.

Hasn’t fear of losing jobs taken hold?

Eric: Some people are scared and afraid of losing their job because of AI. I see AI as assistance. It lets us work faster in daily tasks and, above all, do things we had stopped doing because technological elements like email or videoconferencing take too much of our time. AI tools like Microsoft Copilot allow us to summarize and streamline tasks.

Ariadna: They help with more mechanical tasks and give us more time to be creative.

Does today’s AI remove bureaucracy for you?

Ariadna: In my case, yes.

Aren’t you afraid that in a few years AI might become more creative than humans?

Ariadna and Eric: Creativity is human. The machine itself is not creative. A camera isn’t either.