Humankind is entering a novel creative era in which anybody can synthesize digital information using generative artificial intelligence (AI). Text-to-image generation, in particular, has become vastly popular and millions of practitioners produce AI-generated images and AI art online. This chapter first gives an overview of the key developments that enabled a healthy co-creative online ecosystem around text-to-image generation to rapidly emerge, followed by a high-level description of key elements in this ecosystem. A particular focus is placed on prompt engineering, a creative practice that has been embraced by the AI art community. It is then argued that the emerging co-creative ecosystem constitutes an intelligent system on its own - a system that both supports human creativity, but also potentially entraps future generations and limits future development efforts in AI. The chapter discusses the potential risks and dangers of cultivating this co-creative ecosystem, such as the bias inherent in today's training data, potential quality degradation in future image generation systems due to synthetic data becoming common place, and the potential long-term effects of text-to-image generation on people's imagination, ambitions, and development.

翻译：人类正进入一个全新的创意时代，任何人都可以利用生成式人工智能（AI）合成数字信息。特别是文本到图像生成技术已变得极为普及，数百万实践者在线生成AI图像和AI艺术作品。本章首先概述了使围绕文本到图像生成的健康共创在线生态系统迅速崛起的关键发展，随后从高层次描述了该生态系统的核心要素。特别关注了提示工程——这一被AI艺术社区广泛采用的创造性实践。接着论述了新兴的共创生态系统本身构成一个智能系统——它既支持人类创造力，也可能束缚后代并限制AI未来发展的努力。本章讨论了培育这一共创生态系统的潜在风险与危害，例如当前训练数据中固有的偏见、合成数据普及可能导致未来图像生成系统质量下降，以及文本到图像生成对人类想象力、抱负和发展的长期潜在影响。