Inspirational prompting vs. descriptive prompting
When working with AI image generation, a natural question arises: how much should we guide the AI, and how much freedom should we leave open? Sometimes, the best results come from providing a loose, imaginative direction. Other times, achieving a specific vision requires detailed and structured guidance. These two different approaches can be thought of as inspirational prompting and descriptive prompting, each suited to different creative goals.
In this section, we’ll walk through both styles and how they shape the collaboration between you and the AI.
What is inspirational prompting?
Inspirational prompting is about exploration. Instead of instructing the AI to build a specific scene or subject, you offer broad ideas, emotions, or artistic styles—and invite the AI to show you what it imagines. This method gives the AI more space to act as a creative partner, generating visual interpretations that can surprise and inspire you.
With inspirational prompting, you're not focused on strict control. Instead, you're providing a loose framework to spark ideas.
For example, an inspirational prompt might look like:
Surrealism, dreamlike atmosphere, distorted reality, vivid imagination.
These aren’t full sentences or detailed instructions. They’re fragments of thought—keywords that suggest a mood, a style, or a feeling, without defining exactly what the image must contain.
This approach is especially valuable when:
- You are exploring possibilities without a fixed goal.
- You want the AI to introduce new and unexpected ideas.
- You are seeking inspiration for early-stage creative work.
- You are focusing more on overall mood and atmosphere than on concrete details.
By using inspirational prompting, you allow yourself to enter a phase of open exploration. You’re giving the AI permission to take the lead in offering visual ideas, which you can then refine, develop, or even remix into future projects.
What is descriptive prompting?
Descriptive prompting takes the opposite approach: it is about control. Here, the goal is to carefully guide the AI to produce a specific result by describing key elements with precision. The more detailed and deliberate your instructions, the closer the output will align with your intended vision.
A descriptive prompt might sound like:
Fantasy artwork depicting a planet near Earth under a dark blue night sky. Foreground: 10 to 15 small and large glowing, beautiful fish-like creatures floating in the air, emitting soft rim lighting. Middle ground: A bioluminescent seashore with a peninsula extending quietly in the background. Background: An enormous Earth positioned in the top right corner. Perspective: Low-angle shot to emphasize the grandeur of the scene.
This prompt clearly defines the image across several important dimensions:
- Image Themes: It establishes the main focus—the dynamic, glowing fish-like creatures floating through the air and the striking view of the Earth in the background.
- Structure & Layout: By specifying the foreground, middle ground, and background, it organizes how each element is arranged within the frame, creating a layered and coherent composition.
- Artistic Styles: Referring to "fantasy artwork" sets the overall visual language and aesthetic tone.
- Camera Angle / Perspective: A low-angle shot is instructed, deciding the viewer’s point of view.
- Lighting / Atmosphere: Soft rim lighting on the creatures and a glowing night environment shape the mood.
- Color & Texture: Descriptions like "dark blue night sky" and "bioluminescent seashore" enrich the scene with specific color.
By thinking through these six elements when crafting a prompt, you leave much less to chance. Each detail helps the AI narrow its interpretation, producing results that are both predictable and repeatable—an essential factor when working on commercial projects, visual branding, or any situation where consistency matters.
However, it’s also important to recognize the limitations of descriptive prompting. While detailed instructions increase control, AI models generate images based on patterns learned from their training data—not by fully understanding complex instructions. If a prompt becomes too rigid, overly structured, or stuffed with conflicting directions, the model may struggle to interpret it properly, resulting in outputs that feel confusing or inconsistent.
Different AI platforms also have different strengths and weaknesses. Some models might interpret atmospheric lighting beautifully but handle object counts inconsistently. Others might excel at structure but simplify detailed textures. Because of this, part of mastering descriptive prompting is learning the tendencies and limitations of each AI model you work with—and adjusting your approach accordingly.
Exploration is still essential even when you aim for control. Testing variations, simplifying where necessary, and being flexible with expectations often lead to better, more refined results.
Descriptive prompting becomes especially important when:
- You have a clear and specific visual goal.
- Visual consistency across multiple images is required.
- You are meeting project, marketing, or client specifications.
- You need full creative control instead of letting the AI freely improvise.
Both inspirational prompting and descriptive prompting offer valuable paths depending on your creative needs. Inspirational prompting leans into exploration, trusting the AI to expand on ideas and lead you into new creative territories. Descriptive prompting focuses on control, helping you shape precise, targeted results when predictability and clarity are required.
Mastering when to explore and when to control is key to becoming an effective AI image creator. In the next chapters, we’ll go deeper into how to refine both approaches—and how to adjust your prompts based on the kind of image you want to bring to life.
Sidebar: Special syntax and platform-specific parameters – Midjourney
While AI image generation is increasingly moving toward natural, conversational prompting, many leading platforms also offer special syntax and parameter settings to give users more precise control over the final image.
Learning how to adjust these settings can enhance the quality, format, and predictability of your results—especially when aiming for polished, professional images.
One of the clearest examples is Midjourney, which originally operates through the Discord platform.
In Midjourney's Discord workflow, users can add simple syntax after the main prompt description to fine-tune how images are generated. For example, to request a higher level of image refinement, you can add --q 2, which instructs the AI to spend more time and resources creating a richer, more detailed image. If you want to reproduce a specific visual style or generate variations on an image, you can lock the random seed by adding --seed 12345.
Today, most image generation platforms—including the new Midjourney Web UI—also offer the ability to adjust key parameters through simple mouse operations, such as selecting aspect ratio, quality, or style settings.
This makes the generation process much more accessible for users who prefer a visual interface, while still offering powerful customization options behind the scenes.
Although you may need to slightly tailor your prompting approach depending on the platform you are using, the core techniques introduced here apply universally across platforms.