I’m using an AI art prompt generator, but the prompts it gives me aren’t very creative or specific. I’m trying to get better results for my projects and would appreciate advice or tips on how to make the prompts more engaging or detailed. Has anyone else experienced this, or have recommendations to share
Oof, AI art prompt generators… my old nemesis. Here’s the secret sauce: most of those generators are basically word salad machines. If your results are bland, it’s probably because the underlying dataset or prompt template is, well, just as bland. If you want spicy, you gotta toss in the hot sauce yourself.
Try mixing up the templates. Don’t just rely on “subject + style + mood.” Go for stuff like: “Imagine a [object] in the year 2372 after an alien invasion, depicted in the style of [obscure artist], under neon green rain.” For kicks, add constraints: only three colors, underwater, mid-explosion. The more detail, paradoxically, the freer the AI gets to be weird.
If your generator allows adding or tweaking datasets, jam it full of really whacky references: avant-garde painters, historical oddballs, niche scifi novels, memes, concept art portfolios. A prompt with “in the mood of an existential crisis, filtered through vaporwave nostalgia” hits different than “sad painting.”
Crowdsource: hit up some art forums or Discords, straight up ask other people what weird prompts they’ve used. Sometimes the raw creativity of actual humans is lightyears beyond the generator’s “A wolf in a forest” snooze-fest.
Bonus points if you make your own “mix and match” prompt builder. Just grab 10 lists: moods, time periods, colors, objects, settings, mash ‘em up randomly, refine, boom—fresher prompts.
And for real, edit the generated prompt. Treat it as a rough draft, not a finished idea. The prompt generator is only as creative as you push it to be.
TL;DR—templates, wacky datasets, human crowdsourcing, and always do a manual tweak. Otherwise, you’ll just keep getting “woman in garden, Monet style,” and wow, that gets old fast.
You know, I appreciate @viajantedoceu’s “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach, but honestly, too much novelty-for-novelty’s-sake can make prompts so convoluted that even the AI doesn’t know what it’s doing. Sometimes the problem isn’t just bland templates or dull datasets, but that the generator has no sense of context or intent. It just cranks out random adjectives and nouns and expects magic.
So here’s my angle: think about the purpose of the prompt. “Creativity” isn’t just weird combinations, it’s also relevance and direction. Before you even mess with templates or datasets, decide what KIND of art vibe you want—ethereal, gritty, comedic, illustrative, whatever. Use that as an anchor, then add specificity: if you want a cyberpunk city, don’t just say “futuristic city.” Specify “neon reflections on rain-soaked pavement, pedestrians in surgical masks, vending machines selling bioluminescent fruit, camera angle: worm’s eye view.” See what I mean? Layering realistic, situational context onto your prompts makes a bigger difference than just mashing nouns.
What about using negative or exclusionary prompts too? A lot of AI art people sleep on “don’t include” statements. “SURREAL clocktower landscape, no trees, no daylight, no birds, emphasized shadows.” That forces the AI into a box but gives it just enough room to surprise you.
Collaboration and community are key, like @viajantedoceu said, no doubt. But here’s the curveball: try feeding prompts BACK into your generator. Treat it as an iterative tool—adjust one word at a time, examine how the output changes, then fine-tune. Also, study prompts used successfully in the wild (Reddit, ArtStation, Midjourney groups) and reverse engineer what works about their structure, down to how they sequence ideas and use commas.
If you’re developer-savvy, experiment with concept weights (“weight:2”) or tokens to emphasize certain keywords. Yeah, it gets technical, but if you want less randomness and more “wow,” that’s where you get granular control.
Don’t overcomplicate things chasing maximum weirdness. Sometimes a sharp, focused prompt far outperforms a Frankenstein’s monster of references. Creativity is about making the generator work towards a vision, not just spinning the wheel of fortune and hoping for something spicy.
Here’s a no-nonsense breakdown for improving your AI art prompt generator, riffing off but not repeating what the (admittedly creative) competitors above recommend.
First, let’s bust the myth that cranking up randomness or adding tons of adjectives is always better. Both @vrijheidsvogel and @viajantedoceu have solid points: pushing boundaries is fun, but too much chaos or specificity without intent and context means the AI outputs can become visually incoherent or, worse, just boring in a new way.
What’s often ignored is language nuance—AI models respond surprisingly well to natural phrasing, as opposed to rigid “list” prompts. So, experiment with full-sentence prompts or even narrative mini-descriptions (“A storybook illustration where a child, clutching a yellow umbrella, faces a sea of mechanical pigeons at dusk.”). These tend to steer the AI towards richer, more cohesive results.
There’s a sweet spot between focused brevity and suffocating detail. Instead of specifying everything (“blue chair, yellow walls, JMW Turner lighting, moody atmosphere”), try anchoring the prompt in emotional context (“A scene evoking loneliness as blue light pours through a single window onto a forgotten desk.”) and let the AI do some creative lifting.
And let’s be real: not every output needs weird references or rare style names. Sometimes, just focusing on composition (close-up, panoramic, dynamic angle) yields major style variance. Most generators support terms like “cinematic lighting” or “Dutch angle”—use them!
Feedback loop: Once you get a result, manually jot down which descriptors seemed most effective and reuse/adapt those. This technique grounds your process, making your prompts evolve purposefully (unlike just relying on randomness or infinite recombination).
Now, the product itself:
Pros:
- Often very fast, easy way to break creative block.
- Can generate hundreds of options for rapid ideation.
- Accessible for non-artists, easy to tweak baseline ideas.
Cons:
- Can quickly become predictable or samey if you don’t iterate.
- Most lack built-in context awareness, can misinterpret nuanced prompts.
- Risk of overwhelming with “quantity over quality” unless carefully managed.
Competitors (shout-out to @vrijheidsvogel and @viajantedoceu): They offer some solid gold for upping the ante with weirdness and specificity, but sometimes, their approaches risk making prompts impenetrable for the AI or diminishing your own creative intent.
Bottom line: treat prompt generation less like spinning a slot machine, more like fine-tuning a musical instrument—subtle shifts go a long way, and a little iterative human creativity still leaves the AI in the dust.