Casting a creative spell

“It's kind of a trade secret, the secret of every creator to not give these away” says Max. “But I was just curious to know the prompts myself, basically. So that’s why I reached out to a lot of creators that I liked and asked them, ‘hey, would you mind sharing just a few prompts?’” Contributors were given carte blanche to devise whatever they wanted, subject to a few parameters such as no image inputs allowed, and no reference to living artists (Max is alert to the criticisms levelled at AI, that it erodes the right of creatives to control and benefit from their own work).

The response to his request was positive – and revealing. As Max puts it, “there's no other creative process that I know of where the thought process of creation is so transparent. If you look at a photograph, you don't get to see the ideas for composition that the photographer had when he took it. With this, you do.” In ‘Spells’ we can read the words that made the AI respond as it did, which expands our definitions of creativity and leads us to ponder how we might interact with such tools in future.

‘Spells’ is designed to function as “a sort of archive or documentation of the current state of the technology”. But why in book form, and not digital? Max likes the paradox of displaying the fruits of emerging techniques inside one of the oldest means of mass communication. He describes the books as “transitional objects”, in that they bridge the gap between traditional printed media and the digital/AI world. “Images are degraded in our world and printing these in a book elevates them, gives them durability,” he says. For Max, who uses Midjourney in his own creative work, the artistry consists not merely in having a personal ‘database’ of visual references to draw on, but in being able to articulate to the AI in an imaginative way exactly what it is that you have in your mind’s eye.

“It would be much more practical to say, oh, we have this online library with prompts, you just copy them and put them in the software, and then you can try them out for yourself,” says Max. “But with a book we are deliberately creating friction – people have to basically type in the prompt themselves, manually, and that means they are more likely to change something or to leave something out, and learn from it.”

To stress the books’ physicality he opted for large, heavy tomes, raising the necessary funds on Kickstarter. “The idea is that it’s kind of an archetypical book format. That's why it needed to be so thick, and that’s why there's nothing on the cover. It’s basically just a material and that’s it. When you encounter it, you should think about the fact that this is a book and not a PDF.” For Volume 1, subtitled ‘Pioneers’, he chose tactile, high-quality paper made by Sappi; the cover has a silver mirror-effect. When Peter Goer, Managing Director of Sappi Germany, heard about the project, he offered to sponsor Volume 2 by donating the paper. This second volume, published in 2025 with the subtitle ‘Process’, has a totally black cover and black edges to the pages. “This was to evoke the fact that our notion of AI has changed quite a lot – it has huge creative potential but also it has a dark side and can be extremely dangerous.”

‘Spells’ is fast attaining cult status, with the limited print runs selling out and one New York influencer, a key figure in AI with hundreds of thousands of followers, posting a film of himself unboxing it. Volume 3 is currently in the works and due to come out in 2026.