The emerging field of AI-generated art has witnessed the rise of prompt marketplaces, where creators can purchase, sell, or share prompts to generate unique artworks. These marketplaces often assert ownership over prompts, claiming them as intellectual property. This paper investigates whether concealed prompts sold on prompt marketplaces can be considered bona fide intellectual property, given that humans and AI tools may be able to infer the prompts based on publicly advertised sample images accompanying each prompt on sale. Specifically, our study aims to assess (i) how accurately humans can infer the original prompt solely by examining an AI-generated image, with the goal of generating images similar to the original image, and (ii) the possibility of improving upon individual human and AI prompt inferences by crafting combined human and AI prompts with the help of a large language model. Although previous research has explored AI-driven prompt inference and protection strategies, our work is the first to incorporate a human subject study and examine collaborative human-AI prompt inference in depth. Our findings indicate that while prompts inferred by humans and prompts inferred through a combined human and AI effort can generate images with a moderate level of similarity, they are not as successful as using the original prompt. Moreover, combining human- and AI-inferred prompts using our suggested merging techniques did not improve performance over purely human-inferred prompts.

翻译：AI生成艺术这一新兴领域见证了提示市场的兴起，创作者可在其中购买、出售或分享用于生成独特艺术作品的提示。这些市场常主张对提示拥有所有权，将其视为知识产权。本文探讨了在提示市场上出售的隐藏提示能否被视为真正的知识产权，因为人类和AI工具可能根据公开宣传的每款在售提示所附带的示例图像推断出提示内容。具体而言，本研究旨在评估：（i）人类仅通过观察AI生成图像来推断原始提示的准确度，其目标是生成与原始图像相似的图像；（ii）借助大型语言模型，通过组合人类与AI提示来改进个体人类与AI提示推断的可能性。尽管先前研究已探索过AI驱动的提示推断与保护策略，但我们的工作首次纳入了人类受试者研究，并深入探讨了人机协同的提示推断。研究结果表明，虽然人类推断的提示以及人机协同推断的提示能生成具有中等相似度的图像，但其效果均不及使用原始提示。此外，采用我们建议的融合技术将人类推断与AI推断的提示相结合，其性能并未超越纯粹由人类推断的提示。