Simply put, prompt engineering is the process of carefully crafting and tuning prompts for AI generation. A prompt is a piece of input that an AI system uses to generate output, such as a text, image, or audio clip. By carefully designing and fine-tuning these prompts, we can help AI systems to generate more accurate and engaging outputs.
Now, you might be wondering why prompt engineering is so important. After all, don’t AI systems generate whatever you type into them? While it’s true that AI systems can generate stunning outputs by simply typing whatever you wish into an input prompt, the results can often be unstructured and unpredictable. By providing carefully designed prompts, we can guide the AI system and help it to generate more coherent and useful outputs.
For example, imagine that you’re building an AI system that’s capable of generating pictures. Without prompts, how would it generate a scene of “A statue on the side of a cliff in Japan”? It may choose to generate a beautiful statue, then put the cliff in the background to the side, and the setting is Japan. Or it may have been trained that pictures of Japan, that are by cliff sides, are usually accompanied by Japanese architecture, so a traditional Japanese building becomes a focal point instead of the statue. However, by providing carefully designed prompts, such that different concepts are more or less weighted based on how the model is trained, the AI can create incredible and well imagined art.
Prompt engineering is an essential aspect of AI generation. By carefully designing and fine-tuning prompts, we can help AI systems generate more accurate and engaging outputs. Without prompt engineering, AI systems will generate results based on how the data was trained and will create biases in the resulting work. Prompt engineering allows us to guide the AI system and create more coherent, useful and artful outputs.
Start Creating, like a prompt engineer!
MitchJourn-E is a tool that incorporates Prompt Engineering as a core concept when creating images. You can define weights for each part of your prompt and add helper words and negative prompts automatically. MitchJourn-E is free and open source on GitHub: MitchOkabe/MitchJourn-e: Windows desktop application for Stable Diffusion (github.com)