- A report analyzing nearly five million Midjourney prompts reveals Alphonse Mucha as the most-prompted artist across categories.
- Zaha Hadid topped the architect category, surpassing Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, while Wes Anderson led among film directors.
- Star Wars was the most prompted franchise, even as Disney and Universal pursue copyright lawsuits against Midjourney over A.I. image use.
Three years on from text-to-image generators gaining widespread popularity, their shock value may have ebbed, but the ethical questions they pose remain largely unanswered. For some, A.I. image generators pose an existential threat to the creative industries, for others they’re an essential professional and personal tool.
A new report into the prompts on the A.I. image generator Midjourney sheds light on the ways in which the divisive tools are being used. Perhaps surprisingly, the most prompted artist on the platform is Alphonse Mucha, the Czech-born artist whose posters of flower-crowned maidens are synonymous with the Art Nouveau movement. Rembrandt was the second most prompted artist, with Mucha receiving roughly four times as many prompts as the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Norman Rockwell, and Gustav Klimt. Polish illustrator Karol Bak, Caravaggio, Hokusai, and American psychedelic artist Alex Grey took the remaining spots in the top 10.
Alphonse Mucha, Monaco Monte-Carlo (1897). Collection of the Mucha Trust, ©Mucha Trust 2025.
The ranking comes from the San Francisco-based online content creation platform Kapwing. It identified around 900 keywords across nearly 5 million prompts and then organized them into eight categories: artists, illustrators, directors, architects, cities, media, franchises, fast-food chains, and anime. Mucha was the most used term across all categories, receiving over 64,000 more prompts than WLOP, a digital fantasy illustrator.
Zaha Hadid was by far the most prompted architect on Midjourney. The late Iraqi-British architect received more prompts than Frank Lloyd Wright, Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Peter Zumthor, Kengo Kuma, and Bjarke Ingels combined. Curiously, in 2023, Zaha Hadid Architects’ studio head Patrik Schumacher acknowledged that the firm used A.I. image generators to produce project ideas. Le Corbusier, Richard Meier, and Jean Nouvel were the next most-prompted architects.
Greg Rutkowski, Dragon’s Breath (2016). Courtesy of the artist.
In the illustration category, the most prompted artist was WLOP followed by the Poland-based digital creator Greg Rutkowski, who has been an outspoken critic of A.I. image generators. Rutkowski has illustrated fantasy scenes for Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering and previously told Artnet News: “A.I. should exclude living artists from its database and focus on works under the public domain.”
The most prompted anime was the Japanese cyberpunk classic Akira (1988), followed by the manga series Naruto, Ghost in the Shell (1995), Dragon Ball, and Attack on Titan. A pair of Hayao Miyazaki films, Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and Spirited Away (2001), both landed in the top 10 for anime—unsurprising given Studio Ghibli-style A.I.-generated images flooded the internet earlier this year. The most prompted director was Wes Anderson, who was used over 60 percent more than Tim Burton.
Mark Hamill and Yoda in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Photo: Lucasfilm / Sunset Boulevard / Corbis via Getty Images.
More broadly, in the most prompted media franchise category, Star Wars took top spot with more than 160,000 prompts. Disney, which bought Star Wars from George Lucas for $4.05 billion in stock and cash in 2012, filed a federal lawsuit (together with Universal) against Midjourney, alleging direct and secondary copyright infringement in June. In response, Midjourney said it operated within fair use parameters and that the plaintiff companies use and profit from their “use of Midjourney and other generative A.I. tools.”
The second most prompted franchise was Batman, owned by Warner Bros which is also suing Midjourney for copyright infringement. Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, Pokémon, The Matrix, Superman, Harry Potter, Mario, and Warcraft completed the top 10.