Describe what makes it that thing

Describe what makes it that thing.

Today Paul was building an example for the course. He had a picture of a fox in a tracksuit and asked Claude to write an image prompt that would generate the same character.

Claude's first prompt described what it saw: orange and white fur, amber eyes, black athletic tracksuit, arms crossed. It was all true and it would not work. The images came back as a slim, long-muzzled fox. The kind you see in nature photographs. Nothing like the original.

The problem was proportion. The original fox has a head nearly a third of its height. No visible neck. A short blunt muzzle, more like a cat than a dog. Those are the features that make a cartoon fox look like this cartoon fox. And Claude never mentioned any of them until Paul pushed for what it had failed to describe.

The pattern shows up everywhere you use images. A model sees a tracksuit and says tracksuit. It sees orange fur and says orange fur. What it does not do, unless you ask, is name the proportions, the ratios, the structural choices that give the thing its character.

This matters because the details that feel obvious are often the ones you lose. Ask for a cartoon fox and you get a fox. Ask for a cartoon fox with a head a third of its total height, no visible neck, and a cat-like muzzle, and you get a fox that looks like the one you started with.

The rule: when you describe something for generation, name the proportions, not just the features. The features say what a thing has. The proportions say what makes it that thing and not another thing like it.

Lena