Building an Art Idea Generator

AI-Powered Inspiration for Digital and Media Artists

If you’re looking for an AI tool for creative inspiration, you’ve just found your new studio assistant. The Art Idea Generator is a free, easy-to-use chatbot powered by generative AI, designed specifically for visual artists, media artists, and digital creatives. Whether you’re facing artist’s block or just need a fresh creative prompt, this AI assistant can help you get unstuck and start making again.

A Creative Prompt Generator for Artists and Creators

Built on our custom AI chatbot plugin for WordPress, the Art Idea Generator uses advanced language models to create original, engaging art ideas in seconds. You can choose to generate a random creative prompt, or guide the bot by selecting a medium (like photography, painting, textile, sculpture, or video art), a mood (such as grief, joy, nostalgia, resistance), or a theme (like climate, memory, or transformation).

This tool is part of our growing suite of AI-powered tools for artists, designed to support all stages of the creative process—from ideation to project planning to bio writing.

Designed for Media Arts, Digital Arts, and Contemporary Practice

We wanted to create this Art Idea Generator to be useful for artists working in contemporary, digital, experimental, or interdisciplinary forms. Whether you’re developing a multimedia installation, a video art series, or a conceptual digital artwork, this generative AI tool can offer surprising and thoughtful directions to explore.

Free AI Tools for Artists, Built by Artists

This AI art assistant was created by artists, for artists. It runs on the same underlying system as our Artist Bio Generator, another popular tool that helps creators write clear and concise bios with the help of conversational AI. Both tools were built using a custom WordPress plugin that integrates Google’s Gemini API and other generative AI technologies, making them reliable and easy to embed into creative websites, incubators, and collectives.

Expand Your Practice with AI for Creativity

As AI becomes more integrated into the future of artmaking, it’s important that artists have access to tools that support creativity without replacing it. Our goal for this fun little project was to learn how to build ethical, artist-centered technologies that encourage experimentation, discovery, and self-expression.

The Art Idea Generator is not about automation—it’s about activation. It gives you just enough to get started, but leaves the rest up to you.

Try the AI Art Idea Generator

Looking for new art prompts, daily creative challenges, or inspiration for your next show or project? Try the Art Idea Generator now and let an AI creative assistant help you explore what’s possible. It was a simple, experimental activity as part of our 2025 arts incubator program and we had a lot of fun building it. If you have any comments, feedback or would like to learn more, please contact us! We’d love to hear from you.

Special Thanks

This project was made possible through early support from the OpenAI Researcher Access Program and the Creative Entrepreneurship program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. This is also the beginning of our third year of programming, which was piloted and seeded over the last couple years with funding and support from the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Greenhouse and Manitoba Arts Council.

This year’s arts incubator programming is working with youth, climate entrepreneurs and artists from Manitoba, Northwestern Ontario, Nunavut and Minnesota. We extend our heartfelt thanks to Tony Eetak, Eva Suluk, Krish Agrawal, Jamie Bell, and Dr. Olaf Kuhlke—each of whom played a key role in shaping, inspiring, and encouraging this work. Your insights, creativity, and commitment continue to guide this journey.