Promptography and the reconfiguration of human creative agency

Abstract

The proliferation of images produced by generative artificial intelligence has created a conceptual lacuna, rendering the term “photography” ontologically inadequate and precipitating widespread debates. This work intervenes by defending the concept of “promptography” to define this new socio-technical practice. We argue that visual promptography is a post-referential modality, distinguished from photography not by its aesthetics but by its genesis in symbolic command rather than indexical capture. Through a critical synthesis, we analyze promptography as a practice enacted through an opaque computational “apparatus,” governed by a “dromological” logic of acceleration that reconfigures creative agency. Anchored in case studies of contemporary artists, our analysis reveals this phenomenon as a potent diagnostic of the current moment, linking the crisis of visual epistemology to the psycho-political pressures of the achievement society. The work establishes the critical importance of this distinction for navigating a culture in which human agency is increasingly defined as a strategic game played against the programmatic logic of intelligent machines.