May 2026 — ChatGPT / API Image Gallery, Prompt Tips, and Help: Generative Art Theme: Science

windysoliloquy:

It needs examples that it already knows , to draw from/relate to surrealism, and expanding its pool of things to draw from…

Yeah totally

What I find interesting here is that one-word prompts are not really testing prompt skill. They are testing the model’s default visual priors.

So again I did a quick test on both API and ChatGPT (5.5-Thinking).

Woman

API (gpt-image-2)

ChatGPT

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Flower

API (gpt-image-2)

ChatGPT

When the prompt is underconstrained, like “woman” or “flower,” the model has to fill in almost everything on its own. That is where the deeper pattern becomes visible. It falls back to its strongest internal defaults: for “woman,” a young attractive face, soft portrait framing, symmetrical beauty cues, polished lighting and a familiar aesthetic template. For “flower,” a centered pink bloom, shallow depth of field, and a clean botanical close-up.

The interesting part is not just that the outputs are good or steerable, but that they are so similar across both ChatGPT and the API. That suggests the model is relying on a fairly narrow set of dominant visual prototypes when the prompt gives it very little to work with. As already stated here before.

So how I understand this, detailed prompts are useful for testing controllability. Minimal, one- word prompts are useful for observing default priors, concept clustering and which visual templates the model falls back on when the prompt is underconstrained.

jeffvpace:

control surrealism if the background is prompted as non-surrealistic

Thanks for the tip, I tried with this prompt.

Create a realistic, non-surrealistic modern apartment interior as the background. In the foreground, place one surrealist object: a porcelain teacup opening into a miniature stormy ocean, painted with quiet uncanny realism. Keep the background ordinary, natural and non-surrealistic. No desert, no melting clocks, no floating symbolic objects, no Dalí-like landscape.