Prompting and model tips and tricks

The phrases used by this prompt generator are meant to follow a scheme of simplicity, and try to help you get visually-interesting and high-quality outputs without resorting to shotgunning dozens of artist names and tokens copied from others' prompts all for a pretty, but irrelevant image.

We must always keep in mind that the AI's capacity to output what you want it to depends heavily on the information it was trained on, as well as how it makes sense of what you tell it. It's good to get in a habit of asking yourself, "Is this thing I want something that was probably in the dataset enough for it to understand? Was the aesthetic I want in there, too?" Additionally, if you stick a prompt into a tokenizer, you'd be surprised to see what kinds of words and phrases end up being split in half and understood separately, even though they might make sense to us. If a model wasn't trained enough to understand what a crying tablecloth in a shower, or what a man doing a full scorpion looks like, you're going to have a hard time.

In a similar vein, a model that is trained on an artist's art is going to skewed more towards not just their art style, but also the actual contents of their art. Other, specialized models are a similar story. Great for one thing, but harder for many others. Yet, this can also be to your advantage, depending on what you want. Base Stable Diffusion can sometimes struggle with understanding, and blending, art styles and moods when combined with certain phrases, yet models with further training on digital art can get away with it easier.

Creatures may be hard to get looking right sometimes, and some things like vehicles can be tricky, as well. A UI that has attention weighting and inpainting, like InvokeAI, will go a long way if you like a particular prompt that isn't coming out right immediately.

Model choice is crucial, depending on what you want. To start, some great general-purpose Stable Diffusion model mixes include:

• Roboetic's Mix
• DreamShaper v3.3
• TheAlly's Mix II
• Elldreth's StolenDreams

Some specific prompts are best tackled with a more focused model, like Sci-Fi Diffusion for prompts of spaceships and other high-tech subjects/styles.

Good luck!