A Time Capsule of 2023 Prompting: 15,000 Prompts from the DALL-E 3 Discord

A Time Capsule of 2023 Prompting: 15,000 Prompts from the DALL-E 3 Discord

Wikiprompt just absorbed the LAION community's archive of the DALL-E 3 launch era: 15,327 real user prompts with their generations, collected on Discord between October 2023 and June 2024 and released as a CC0 dataset. Every one is browsable on the encyclopedia with its original date and image. Read together, they are a time capsule of how people prompted two years ago - and the differences from today's habits are striking.

What 2023 asked for

The keyword profile of the DALL-E 3 era, from our metadata across all 15k:

The house style: absurd juxtaposition

The top-rated prompts of the era share one move - put two things together that have no business coexisting:

DALL-E 3's instruction-following made this genre possible: it was the first model that reliably rendered the whole absurd sentence, so the community competed on concept instead of craft. Prompt engineering as wit.

Why it reads differently now

Today's top prompts are production briefs: camera bodies, lighting setups, aspect ratios, parameter blocks. The 2023 corpus has almost none of that - prompts are single flowing sentences describing a scene, because that was the whole interface. Nothing documents the professionalization of prompting more clearly than putting these two eras side by side.

Explore the capsule

Every prompt keeps its original publication date, so the catalog timeline now reaches back to October 2023. Browse all DALL-E 3 prompts, see the full dataset provenance on Hugging Face, or download everything from the open dataset.