Inspired by:
AIxDesign and The Hmm
Write a prompt that captures the essence of your favourite person.
Generative AI often creates stereotypical images of people—depicting leaders as men, hyper-sexualized Asian women, aggressive Black people, or beauty as smooth skin and symmetrical faces. These tropes are not only damaging but fail to reflect how we see our loved ones. Describing someone in purely physical terms overlooks their aura and the deeper, emotional connection we feel to them—the warmth of their hug, the joy of their laugh. With the exercise Prompt your Person, AIxDesign and The Hmm invite you to explore how combining both visual and emotional prompts can create more meaningful portraits. You will test how AI handles these different approaches and see how it creates identity biases, often favouring specific ‘defaults’. The exercise challenges how AI sees people, nurturing the poet inside of each of us. Can AI truly capture a person when we prompt from the heart instead of the eye?
About the artist:
AIxDESIGN is an independent organization conducting critical and creative research on AI. They challenge mainstream tech narratives by making space for the rest of us—centering intersectional, inclusive, and ethical approaches through community-led projects.
- Close your eyes and think of someone you love.
- Try to describe this person in as much detail as possible.
- Include “photorealistic, portrait, high resolution” in this description and use it as your prompt. Insert this prompt in a text-to-image tool like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion (free to use online) to create a photorealistic portrait of your loved one. Is the result close to the person you have in mind?
- Add a detail to the prompt that captures what makes your loved one unique. Something only you know because you are so close to them.
- Enter your new prompt again in a text-to-image tool to generate a new portrait. What effect did it have on the result? Does it look better?
- Think about some unique qualities that best characterise the person you love. What makes him or her so special to you? Include this inner characterization in your prompt as well.
- Generate a new portrait.
- At which step did the AI-generated portrait most closely resemble the person you love? Was it when you focused mainly on physical descriptions, or when you also included inner traits?