What Your Vocabulary Is Choosing For You

I may have said it a hundred times but your vocabulary is your pallet when it comes to AI a|rt, but also with AI in general.

Vocabulary itself as well as our individual speech and writing patterns are unique. Between generational, educational, social, cultural, occupational and regional dialect there can be a huge gap in vocabulary even within a single household.

Did you know that it was linguistics that caught Ted Kaczynski?  That is how distinctive our language can be and each word has a slightly different interpretation to the AI.

bathroom vs lavatory vs watercloset vs washroom vs powderroom vs restroom vs latrine will give you consistently even if only mildly different results from one another.

The images below were made with the same seed # and prompt save for a single word

You may notice that I occasionally collapse phrases into a single unit, removing spaces or physically binding words together. I have found with older system it helps to physically attach words to one another to solidify the association to the AI if it could be confused with two words individually either via eliminating the space between the words or adding -. I prefer the former for saving space in systems where character count is a limitation. 

Some concepts fracture when written as separate words. A “water closet” can easily become “water” and “closet,” each exerting its own visual pull. The result is often incoherent, not because the system failed, but because the instruction was structurally ambiguous.

By merging the words, I am signaling that this is a single object, a unified concept. There appears to be a normalization layer inside these systems, something adjacent to spellcheck or token repair. Leaning into that behavior often produces cleaner, more faithful results. I remove the space rather than add a hyphen simply to preserve prompt economy in character limited systems.

When a word overwhelms, force rarely helps, but subtlety does. A “bloom” behaves differently than a “flower”. A “blossom” carries less visual authority than a “bouquet”. Unraveling these concepts invites a more layered approach with more varied results. This choice to shift language will adjust the system’s posture and add more of the human nuance usually void in these renders.

This is often where people default to artist references. That shortcut works, but it also bypasses a deeper skill: learning how language alone can redirect an outcome.

If you haven’t been able to produce precisely what you’ve been striving to create, try out some synonyms or another way of describing the same thing.  There are some things from my imagination that I have yet to properly convey to the AI, I will often backburner an idea when it becomes frustrating and take it back out when I have something new to try, there is a certain fulfillment in conquering a prompt.