AI prompts for design - Where am I going wrong?

[Mont Blanc]

If this is best suited to another part of the forum, please move it, but I thought I would start here.

I am playing with car design/styling in CoPilot, and finding it quite frustrating. I am trying to ask AI to do simple things, but it constantly goes rogue and makes loads of other alterations to the car design that I have expressly forbidden.

For example, I'm playing with photos of a kit car design at the moment but wanting to try out different wheels, lights, spoilers, paint colours etc, and I am feeding CoPilot a simple photo of the car in white paint, and asking things like "Can you paint the car Ford Imperial Blue, and add a set of 18" Fifteen52 Turbomac alloy wheels. Do not change any other aspect of the car styling or design"

Or I might ask "Paint the car Porsche Guards Red and replace the headlights with Nissan 300ZX units. Do not make any other changes to the styling or the design of the car".

Despite these very simple requests, AI deems it necessary to restyle the bumpers, restyle the spoiler, add Ferrari badges, change the indicators, move the tail lights, and generally mess about with everything I have asked it not to....

I have seen some really amazing pieces of AI prototype car design recently which people have said was a result of 'many AI prompts to get exactly what they wanted' but I can't seen to get even simple wheel swaps right!

Any tips?

[durbster]

Mont Blanc said:

Despite these very simple requests, AI deems it necessary to restyle the bumpers, restyle the spoiler, add Ferrari badges, change the indicators, move the tail lights, and generally mess about with everything I have asked it not to....

That's pretty much what these tools do - they're attempting to turn random noise into what the result of your prompt should look like so there's any number of ways they can make an arse of it. It happens with chat too but it can get away with a lot more because language is more fluid and less defined.

You can tell it to "keep everything else exactly the same" but that doesn't always work, and you're still at the mercy of an algorithm. Sometimes you get lucky, most of the time you don't.

I know people get AI to write the prompts for them on the basis AI should understand AI, but I'm not convinced that's any better due to the nature of how they work.

[Mont Blanc]

durbster said:

That's pretty much what these tools do - they're attempting to turn random noise into what the result of your prompt should look like so there's any number of ways they can make an arse of it. It happens with chat too but it can get away with a lot more because language is more fluid and less defined.

You can tell it to "keep everything else exactly the same" but that doesn't always work, and you're still at the mercy of an algorithm. Sometimes you get lucky, most of the time you don't.

I know people get AI to write the prompts for them on the basis AI should understand AI, but I'm not convinced that's any better due to the nature of how they work.

I will keep trying, but it just seems so unintuitive.

"Here you go, I have designed your sleek new sports car"

I didn't want or ask for a fking sleek new sports car!

Oddly if it is non-car related stuff, I seem to get half-decent results. I have used it around my house to show me what rooms would look like with different furniture and colours, or what my garden would look like with a new patio etc, and it works ok.

It's when I try it for car designs that it just goes mental.

Edited by Mont Blanc on Friday 2nd January 10:54

[SuffolkDefender]

CoPilot is not exactly the best tool for what you're wanting to achieve.

You might want to try Sora, Grok or MidJourney. You'll still get quirky results, but less quirky than with something like CoPilot, which is best at working with MS365 suite and not much else.

[Mont Blanc]

SuffolkDefender said:

CoPilot is not exactly the best tool for what you're wanting to achieve.

You might want to try Sora, Grok or MidJourney. You'll still get quirky results, but less quirky than with something like CoPilot, which is best at working with MS365 suite and not much else.

I'm only using CoPilot as it is included in my MS Office package so I get unlimited attempted at anything. My experience of others like ChatGPT is you only get a handful of attempts at anything before being told to wait 24hrs.

Are the ones you mentioned free and unlimited?

[StevieBee]

I run a comms agency and what you've described resonates with me greatly.

Only yesterday, I asked Ai to place an advert I'd designed onto an advertising display situated outside a British Supermarket. This, it did, but saw fit to split elements of the advert out of the advert and place them randomly across the image. I tried several times and ended up using a PSD mock-up file and did it myself.

Another recent howler was a request to create an image of a mixed-race male driving on a British road. This is what I got:



It is very much hit and miss. Sometimes I'm astounded at what can be produced and other times, frustrated at the idiocy of it.

We're told that Ai improves exponentially with use but I've been using it for over two years and have seen no discernible improvement.

My guess is that when it comes to the generation of imagery, it can 'over-think' the prompt.

Mont Blanc said:

I'm only using CoPilot as it is included in my MS Office package so I get unlimited attempted at anything. My experience of others like ChatGPT is you only get a handful of attempts at anything before being told to wait 24hrs.

Are the ones you mentioned free and unlimited?

Results do improve with premium services. You have to make peace with the fact that quality does come at a price.

A work around that can be effective is to create something yourself roughly in Photoshop and ask Ai to improve it.

[Mont Blanc]

oh, and another irritation: Why do these things keep getting completely stuck every so often? Is it just a glitch? Is it demand and server load?

"I'm working on it... but it is taking longer than I expected"

"Please wait... I am experiencing some difficulties"

and it will just sit like that for an hour if you let it. Closing the app and starting all over again seems the only remedy.

[durbster]

StevieBee said:

Another recent howler was a request to create an image of a mixed-race male driving on a British road. This is what I got:

That's brilliant

[JoshSm]

StevieBee said:

We're told that Ai improves exponentially with use but I've been using it for over two years and have seen no discernible improvement.

That mostly comes from people trying to imply their product is actually intelligent when it most definitely isn't.

Improvement with use - if you see any - will almost always just be from growing the prompt history/context so it has more to work with on your specific area(s).

Of course if the model changes or it somehow forgets everything (a fairly frequent issue) then all that effort can just evaporate.

The good results make people think AI is brilliant, the dumb results show the actual pattern generating idiot behind the curtain.

[Mont Blanc]

Just to finish off my complaints:

I asked AI to then place my finished car on a Tokyo street with the car viewed from a 'rear three-quarter angle'.

AI then generated an image of the car on a Tokyo street.... viewed from the front

I then typed in "I asked for the car to be viewed from the rear three-quarter angle",

CoPilot replied with, and I quote "You're absolutely right — thanks for catching that. The previous image showed a front three-quarter view, not the rear as you requested."

Whoever is using AI for anything that actually matters needs their head examined, IMO. I appreciate there will be better versions of AI than CoPilot, but FML...

[lizardbrain]

Mont Blanc said:

Whoever is using AI for anything that actually matters needs their head examined, IMO. I appreciate there will be better versions of AI than CoPilot, but FML...

whoever is doing something that matters probably doesn't have the same unrealistic 'free and unlimited' criteria

I've been doing some interior design brainstorming, and I've had to get a separate subscription for a dedicated model despite paying 200 quid a month for Claude Max as the general models don't do everything

[Brainpox]

Copilot is for writing emails that are unnecessarily long. Its “free” because it is cheap and cheerful. Other models are dedicated to image production, they use a lot of energy to process requests and that’s why you have to pay.

There isn’t one that’s good at everything. There’s a limit to the resources that are available so tend to focus learning in specific areas, rather than a jack of all trades that gets you Copilot.