I’m sure this is meant as a joke. But, really, prompts are the only part of AI art that is actually creative. Especially if someone has been trying to fine tune what they want for a while, the prompt might actually have something interesting in it.
Even though memes are shared as images, it’s often the text that’s the important and funny bit. The meme image is just context for the words.
I’m not saying I’m actually interested in reading people’s AI prompts. But, there might be an interesting idea in that prompt that the person could express in a way that’s not boring and soulless like GenAI tends to be.
This came up back on Reddit in the “what’s that book?” sub. Someone posted asking about a book; they had 6 lines of preamble about why they wanted to reread this, and 55 lines that were an excerpt from the book. This is normally a slam dunk–it’s pretty trivial to search for literal text. But nobody could find it. Discussion with the user led to the revelation that they’d asked AI about a book and described a scene they remembered, and the AI had responded with a title and “excerpt” matching what the user described. But then the user still couldn’t find the book, so they posted the “excerpt” to the subreddit. I.e., they were asking for a book containing an AI hallucination, rather than just describing the book to us the way they had to the AI. In fact the story they were searching for was “Harrison Bergeron,” one of the most commonly asked-about things on the subreddit, but nobody recognized it until we understood that the excerpt was slop made up in response to a scene they misremembered as part of the story.
It’s a frustrating time to be a human on the internet.
Man, that sucks. It’s really annoying how sycophantic these companies have made their chatbots, which makes this worse.
But, I think by the very nature of how chatbots work, you can’t fix that problem. Chatbots simulate what text is likely to follow other text.
If someone online has definitely read a book that really exists, and they describe a scene they remember from that book, the clear pattern online is that someone will say “Oh yeah, that’s the book X by author Y”. Some people might say “I’ve never heard of that book”, but it’s likely they might just not say anything. If we’re looking at a kind of forum with upvotes and downvotes, the person who found the real book will be the most upvoted.
So, that’s the pattern the LLM trains on. It knows that when someone posts a question like that, the best answer is one where someone names the book and types out the passage in the book.
It would be nice if the chatbot would instead say “I don’t know that book” or “That book doesn’t exist”.
But, it can’t do that, because it doesn’t “know” anything. Everything the chatbots put out is a hallucination. It’s just that some hallucinations are more useful. It has been trained millions of times on patterns when the passage someone remembers is “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times”, so when it hallucinates about that sequence of words, its hallucination is bound to be more helpful. But, if what someone remembers doesn’t exist, or is obscure enough that it’s not in the training data, things break. Then it follows the general pattern used for every other book, and comes up with a “useful” answer that doesn’t match any actual book.
It’s definitely in the nature of the current-gen systems. It’s possible to imagine other ways to train chatbots that wouldn’t favor bullshitting in the same way, though. The way they currently are isn’t a way they necessarily have to be.
Anyway, it’s very clearly a case where it would have been better to cut out the middleman and just share the prompt, which was my point in sharing it.
well engineered prompts are like a dive into the “psychology” of whatever AI tool you are using. I like the ones that go like “whatever you do, don’t put an elephant in the picture”
And then an elephant appears because “elephant” is a word in the prompt.
It’s interesting because in some ways it’s as if the AI models have a “peekaboo” level of understanding of the world.
If your prompt says something like “a man’s face is hidden behind his hands”, the model goes “aha, I see the word face, I better draw a face”, so you have to get tricky and say “a man’s hands are held up covering up the frontal area of his head”.
Funny thing is it doesn’t happen in LLMs, even if you use couple generations old and in “low effort” settings (which makes mistakes much more often). I don’t know if they have multiple layers of LLMs reconciling the output with the prompt (like how DeepSeek filters certain…ahem…“topics”)
Makes you wonder if it is an architectural thing. It still used a place holder to refer to the elephant in both cases so maybe the AI generating images just use their best version of “that”, don’t know.
Yeah, one of the things that I WILL say there’s an art to… is trying to get Genmoji to generate emojis of copyrighted things without triggering its programming. All creativity goes into basically doing everything you can to walk around the obvious
I think I’d rather read someone’s prompt instead of having them paste me the output. I can always run it myself if I want, but a lot of the time I’d rather cut out the AI
I think most of the time that’s true. But, not always.
For example, I’ve seen people put up funny “remixes” of the “distracted boyfriend” meme. A lot of time they take historical figures, or celebrities, or characters from movies, or something that’s in the news. Now, I prefer the lo-fi versions of those memes where someone just spends 2 minutes in Paint and slaps a few photos together. I’ve also seen GenAI versions, and occasionally they’re good, even if I have an aversion to GenAI stuff.
Now, if the GenAI prompt were just something like “Distracted boyfriend meme but the boyfriend is Trump, the girlfriend is Lindsay Graham and the other girl is Putin”, that might be funny, and you can just know in your head what it looks like. That’s even a good lo-fi way to do it when everybody knows the meme well and can just imagine it. But, if you have a specific idea in mind that’s hard to convey, it can be different.
Sometimes the prompt is hundreds of words long and has to describe the various people’s clothing, their poses, their expressions, then other details like the background, foreground, lighting, etc. Sometimes in that case the result looks really good, and it’s really hard to parse that all in your head.
There’s an art and a skill to doing the kind of creative writing necessary to generate a good AI image. Sometimes you need to know obscure things like specific hairstyle names, car models, types of furniture, lighting techniques, facial expression details, names of articles of men’s and women’s clothing, how to describe poses and posture, etc. But, while that might generate an image that’s exactly how you imagined, it was never designed for a human to understand, and can be really painful and/or tedious to read.
I’m sure this is meant as a joke. But, really, prompts are the only part of AI art that is actually creative. Especially if someone has been trying to fine tune what they want for a while, the prompt might actually have something interesting in it.
Even though memes are shared as images, it’s often the text that’s the important and funny bit. The meme image is just context for the words.
I’m not saying I’m actually interested in reading people’s AI prompts. But, there might be an interesting idea in that prompt that the person could express in a way that’s not boring and soulless like GenAI tends to be.
This came up back on Reddit in the “what’s that book?” sub. Someone posted asking about a book; they had 6 lines of preamble about why they wanted to reread this, and 55 lines that were an excerpt from the book. This is normally a slam dunk–it’s pretty trivial to search for literal text. But nobody could find it. Discussion with the user led to the revelation that they’d asked AI about a book and described a scene they remembered, and the AI had responded with a title and “excerpt” matching what the user described. But then the user still couldn’t find the book, so they posted the “excerpt” to the subreddit. I.e., they were asking for a book containing an AI hallucination, rather than just describing the book to us the way they had to the AI. In fact the story they were searching for was “Harrison Bergeron,” one of the most commonly asked-about things on the subreddit, but nobody recognized it until we understood that the excerpt was slop made up in response to a scene they misremembered as part of the story.
It’s a frustrating time to be a human on the internet.
Man, that sucks. It’s really annoying how sycophantic these companies have made their chatbots, which makes this worse.
But, I think by the very nature of how chatbots work, you can’t fix that problem. Chatbots simulate what text is likely to follow other text.
If someone online has definitely read a book that really exists, and they describe a scene they remember from that book, the clear pattern online is that someone will say “Oh yeah, that’s the book X by author Y”. Some people might say “I’ve never heard of that book”, but it’s likely they might just not say anything. If we’re looking at a kind of forum with upvotes and downvotes, the person who found the real book will be the most upvoted.
So, that’s the pattern the LLM trains on. It knows that when someone posts a question like that, the best answer is one where someone names the book and types out the passage in the book.
It would be nice if the chatbot would instead say “I don’t know that book” or “That book doesn’t exist”.
But, it can’t do that, because it doesn’t “know” anything. Everything the chatbots put out is a hallucination. It’s just that some hallucinations are more useful. It has been trained millions of times on patterns when the passage someone remembers is “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times”, so when it hallucinates about that sequence of words, its hallucination is bound to be more helpful. But, if what someone remembers doesn’t exist, or is obscure enough that it’s not in the training data, things break. Then it follows the general pattern used for every other book, and comes up with a “useful” answer that doesn’t match any actual book.
It’s definitely in the nature of the current-gen systems. It’s possible to imagine other ways to train chatbots that wouldn’t favor bullshitting in the same way, though. The way they currently are isn’t a way they necessarily have to be.
Anyway, it’s very clearly a case where it would have been better to cut out the middleman and just share the prompt, which was my point in sharing it.
I would actually like to read people’s AI prompts.
well engineered prompts are like a dive into the “psychology” of whatever AI tool you are using. I like the ones that go like “whatever you do, don’t put an elephant in the picture”
And then an elephant appears because “elephant” is a word in the prompt.
It’s interesting because in some ways it’s as if the AI models have a “peekaboo” level of understanding of the world.
If your prompt says something like “a man’s face is hidden behind his hands”, the model goes “aha, I see the word face, I better draw a face”, so you have to get tricky and say “a man’s hands are held up covering up the frontal area of his head”.
Funny thing is it doesn’t happen in LLMs, even if you use couple generations old and in “low effort” settings (which makes mistakes much more often). I don’t know if they have multiple layers of LLMs reconciling the output with the prompt (like how DeepSeek filters certain…ahem…“topics”)
Makes you wonder if it is an architectural thing. It still used a place holder to refer to the elephant in both cases so maybe the AI generating images just use their best version of “that”, don’t know.
Yeah, one of the things that I WILL say there’s an art to… is trying to get Genmoji to generate emojis of copyrighted things without triggering its programming. All creativity goes into basically doing everything you can to walk around the obvious
I think I’d rather read someone’s prompt instead of having them paste me the output. I can always run it myself if I want, but a lot of the time I’d rather cut out the AI
I think most of the time that’s true. But, not always.
For example, I’ve seen people put up funny “remixes” of the “distracted boyfriend” meme. A lot of time they take historical figures, or celebrities, or characters from movies, or something that’s in the news. Now, I prefer the lo-fi versions of those memes where someone just spends 2 minutes in Paint and slaps a few photos together. I’ve also seen GenAI versions, and occasionally they’re good, even if I have an aversion to GenAI stuff.
Now, if the GenAI prompt were just something like “Distracted boyfriend meme but the boyfriend is Trump, the girlfriend is Lindsay Graham and the other girl is Putin”, that might be funny, and you can just know in your head what it looks like. That’s even a good lo-fi way to do it when everybody knows the meme well and can just imagine it. But, if you have a specific idea in mind that’s hard to convey, it can be different.
Sometimes the prompt is hundreds of words long and has to describe the various people’s clothing, their poses, their expressions, then other details like the background, foreground, lighting, etc. Sometimes in that case the result looks really good, and it’s really hard to parse that all in your head.
There’s an art and a skill to doing the kind of creative writing necessary to generate a good AI image. Sometimes you need to know obscure things like specific hairstyle names, car models, types of furniture, lighting techniques, facial expression details, names of articles of men’s and women’s clothing, how to describe poses and posture, etc. But, while that might generate an image that’s exactly how you imagined, it was never designed for a human to understand, and can be really painful and/or tedious to read.
A a series fb post from an elderly lady attempting to prompt facebook into simulating her deceased child.
“Keep it realistic. don’t make make them sound too kind.”