Writing With AI
Anything only you know is the part the draft will be missing
Generated prose is assembled from what is widely available, so the material that makes a piece worth…
· 3 min read
Maya Chandrasekar
Senior writer, Prompt After Prompt
Maya writes about prompt craft, writing with ai, images & audio, mostly the parts other people skip and thinks most subjects are more interesting once you know how they work.
Images & Audio
Describing the light and the lens gets further than naming a style
Style words are the least portable and least predictable part of an image prompt, and the physical…
· 3 min read
Prompt Craft
Give it the brief, not the archive
Supplying background is a selection problem, and the instinct to include everything relevant produces worse…
· 3 min read
Prompt Craft
A constraint stated once behaves like a suggestion
Requirements that hold for two or three exchanges and then quietly lapse are not being disobeyed, they are…
· 4 min read
Images & Audio
Decide the shape and the size before you write a word of the prompt
Where a picture will sit determines its proportions, its composition and how much resolution it needs, and…
· 4 min read
Pitfalls
The first draft you are shown becomes the piece you write
Reading a generated version before forming your own view narrows what you subsequently produce, and the…
· 3 min read
Prompt Craft
Ask for options that differ along an axis, or you get one idea five times
Requesting alternatives without saying what should vary produces near-identical drafts, because nothing in…
· 4 min read
Pitfalls
When checking costs more than doing, the tool has stopped saving anything
Every use has a verification cost attached, and the tasks worth automating are the ones where confirming…
· 3 min read
Prompt Craft
Ask about the shape of the problem when you cannot hand over the material
Confidentiality removes the input from the conversation without removing the question, and the workable…
· 4 min read
Images & Audio
Showing a generated image as a concept sets an expectation you may not be able to keep
Pictures made in minutes to explore a direction get read as finished work by whoever sees them, and that…
· 3 min read
Workflows
Six months on, nobody can tell which parts of the document you decided
Keeping a record of the judgements made during a piece of work is more valuable than keeping the…
· 3 min read
Workflows
What passes between two steps has to carry more than the answer
Once a task is split, the design question shifts to what each step hands the next one, and the usual…
· 3 min read
Pitfalls
How sure it sounds is not information you can use
The confidence expressed in an answer is a property of the prose rather than of the claim, which means…
· 3 min read