12How should I use it?

Asking Well

Ask the AI for a picture. You have not said anything yet.

The first four are all different. Different friends, different places.

You said nothing. So the machine picked whatever it liked.

Press a friend card and the friend stays the same. Add a place card and the place stays too.

A card is a word. Words you give an AI are called a .

Decide first, then ask. What is it that I want?

A little deeper

For grown-ups, and for children who want more.

The words you hand an AI are a prompt. What this hands-on shows is that a prompt narrows the range of what comes back.

Say nothing and the machine draws from everything it learned. Add a condition and it narrows to the part that matches. In statistical terms, sampling from the whole distribution becomes sampling from a conditional one.

The pictures in the first rung are not imitations. During training the order is deliberately dropped now and then, which creates an empty order slot (classifier-free guidance); we put that in and sampled straight from it. It genuinely is what this machine draws when nothing was said.

Telling it not to draw anything scary fails for the same reason. Rather than parsing what a sentence means, the machine takes the words inside it as conditions. Writing what you want beats writing what you do not.