Prompts

The first negative prompt, and what it did not stop

The first negative prompt, and what it did not stop

The first prompt in this collection to carry a negative prompt — a whole list of things it does not want. Three runs, and the negatives are the part that did not land.

Second run: same outfit and storefront, but her head is turned away from the camera and she is looking into the distance
Second run — the only one of the three that turns her head away, which is what the prompt actually asked for.
Third run: the same setting and outfit, smiling at the camera with one arm folded across her waist instead of behind it
Third run. Hands were supposed to be behind her waist.

Holds across runs: everything described as an object. The outfit is exact three times over — black sleeveless mock-neck ribbed crop, beige ruched low-rise skirt with the side drawstrings hanging, thin pendant, slim bracelet. So is the set: the same concrete wall, the same glass storefront, even the same window copy in the same place. The chin-length bob with its side part and wispy bangs, and the flat overcast daylight, come back every time.

Varies: her, basically. Where she looks, whether she smiles, and what her arms do. The prompt says the head turns away and she looks into the distance with a calm dreamy expression — one run of three does that; the other two smile straight down the lens. Hands behind the waist survives twice, then one run folds an arm across her front instead. How far down the frame goes wanders too, from mid-thigh to below the knee.

Ignored: the negative prompt, mostly. text, watermark, logo is last on the list and the storefront glass carries a legible sentence in all three runs — the same sentence, in the same spot. exaggerated curves, oversized bust is named twice, once as a negative and once positively as “naturally full proportional… balanced anatomy”, and the runs go the other way regardless. plastic skin and beauty filter are on the list against a paragraph asking for pores and baby hairs, and the skin still reads retouched.

Also ignored: Vertical 4:5 composition and medium framing from the upper thighs, both in paragraph six of eight. All three came back 2:3 and framed lower. That is the third entry in a row where a ratio buried deep in a long prompt was dropped — the double-exposure one did the same. Put the ratio first.

What it suggests: the model reads a prompt as a description of a picture, and a negative is not a thing in a picture. Nouns you can point at — the top, the skirt, the wall, the bob — land almost perfectly. Prohibitions, camera settings and instructions about behaviour are the ones to check, and the ones to fix in a second turn. Worth reading beside the spec-sheet prompt, which carries no negatives at all and loses nothing by it.

Nguyen

I write two things here: notes from a homelab that mostly runs Proxmox, and essays in Vietnamese about a country I left. The technical posts are whatever broke that week, written down so it costs you less time than it cost me.

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