/imagine a single character prompt, just one.

Have you ever wondered how prompt length affects the output image? Is it better to describe in great details what you desire to receive as the final creation or leave some space for the MJ to show off? In fact, we could ask if prompts do have the word limit or a threshold passing which makes the MJ ignore what’s left? A few months back Kris Kashtanova (@icreatelife), one of the most active AI early adopters and creatives, also an Adobe’s Sr. Creative Evangelist – AI, addressed that question on X.

“Elle Mendenhall from the Midjourney Prompt-FAQs Discord forum – Yes, prompts have a max or cap. But it’s not as straight-forward as a word count. Midjourney has a soft maximum of roughly 60 words.

Different versions of Midjourney have different “drop-offs” after which words lose influence…after 60 words, the slope of influence is so low the words are functionally cut off… the slope of influence looks more like this: – Words 1-20: Very influential, will show up on first roll. Words may ‘fight’ to take priority. – Words 21-40: Still strongly in play, may take 2-3 vroll/rerolls, images may get weird as words ‘fight’ for priority. – Words 40+ are less cooperative, but still more likely to be in play.”

Worth noticing is that the above relates to v4 of MJ mainly, and it is yet not that crystal clear how that does work in v5, however it is more or less the methodology behind the prompt length and its weight. There’s also a bunch of other things that matter like “combinatorial” or “permutation” factor. If you want to know how this plays out in detail, read the full thread here.

In other words the shorter a prompt is, the more you leave up to interpretation. We would not be ourselves if we didn’t ask: how short can the prompt be? This is where the fun part starts. We have recently found a great X thread by Tao (@Taoski) who ran a series of prompts while investigating “what sort of results can you get from using a single letter, number or word?”

Type ‘B’.