The Magic Prompt Edition

On technology, text-to-image services, and the spells that lead to great results

Hey everyone, just a reminder that we’ve moved Wednesday’s edition to be subscriber-only. We have some fun ideas for things to do with WITI, but part of that will be about building up our base of subscribers. As part of being a paid subscriber, you now have access to WITI Subscriber’s Discord, which you should sign up for if you haven’t (you’ll need to verify your sub to get access to the channels). Thanks for reading and subscribing! - Noah & Colin

Noah here. At this point, you’ve surely played with (or at least heard of) the various text-to-image AI services that have popped up over the last few months. Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion all work roughly the same way: you give it a prompt, and it returns an image. Beyond the initial amazement of trying one of these things out, the game is to find the best ways to structure your prompt for the particular tool you’re using. When you log into Dall-E, for instance, you’re greeted with a suggested prompt like “An Impressionist oil painting of sunflowers in a purple vase.” 

Sites like PromptHero are a repository of amazing AI-generated images with their associated prompt. A stroll through the galleries gives you some clues to the kinds of special terms and phrases that truly generate magical results.

Why is this interesting?