AI is insatiable

Over the years, we’ve grown to appreciate how well Google would return results from a very short search query. Even though search queries have been getting longer for many years, they’re still relatively short.

AI doesn’t work that way. In fact, when it comes to using AI tools, longer is better. Our search habits aren’t translating very well, or as Seth Godin puts it “ our concision is getting in the way of the insight we’re looking for. “

The solution is pretty simple — use more words when talking to AI tools. They love it!

I first discovered this when I was playing with Midjourney to create images a while back. With Midjourney, you can see the prompts that other people type, and I realized that mine were very short compared to others (and the output suffered as a result).

The hard-working squirrel

Here’s a good example. I might want to create a funny image of a squirrel working at a desk, so my prompt could be “a squirrel wearing glasses working at a desk”. It could be ok, but being more verbose is a good thing. As a point of comparison, here is this squirrel created on Midjourney, with the prompt:

A photorealistic squirrel wearing a wrinkled shirt, crooked tie, and glasses, surrounded by multiple computer monitors, sticky notes, alarm clocks, and spilled coffee. He’s frozen mid-sprint across the desk, trying to grab a ringing phone. Human colleagues in the background watch with concerned expressions. chaotic office environment…