The Prompt Engineer Is the Artist of Our Age

Image caption: A century before AI, Moholy-Nagy explored how technology could expand human expression. Image: Gelatin silver print. Artist: László Moholy-Nagy. Title: “Fotogramm” (1926). Image source: Wikimedia Commons / Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain. Article by Danny Oppenheimer. The MIT Press Reader – November 17, 2025.

In 1839, the French artist Paul Delaroche reportedly looked at the first daguerreotype and declared, “From today, painting is dead.” He had seen the future, and like many who glimpse it too early, he mistook transformation for extinction. Of course, painting didn’t die. It got weirder. Within a few decades, artists were flinging paint onto canvases, bending perspective, and painting clocks that melted like soft cheese. Freed from the burden of realism, painters dove headfirst into abstraction, expressionism, surrealism. The challenge of photography pushed painting toward its most radical innovations. […]

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