Every Image Starts as a Sentence

Before there is any noise, there is a sentence. A prompt is the least glamorous part of making an AI image and the part I spend longest on, because it's writing, and writing is slow.

It's an odd kind of writing. The reader is a model that has never seen the sea but has read a great many captions written under pictures of it. It takes words literally and grammar loosely. Order matters more than it should. Adjectives leak: ask for a red door in a white room and the room may blush. A comma can do more work than a verb.

So the craft is mostly subtraction. My first prompts were long, stacked with every quality I wanted, and they came back crowded and oddly flat, like a room where everyone talks at once. The ones that work now are shorter: a subject, a light, a place, one strange detail. Then I change a single word and run the same seed again, so the only difference between the two pictures is the word. It's the closest thing to a controlled experiment this work allows, and it shows you what each word is actually doing, as opposed to what you hoped it would do.

There's a negative prompt too, a list of what you'd rather not see. Mine has got shorter over time. Most of what I used to put there turned out to be worry.

None of this makes the picture mine the way a drawing would be. But the sentence is mine, every word of it, and most days that's enough to start from.