Course resource
Creative Prompt Library
Prompts for creative work, and the honest question of where AI helps and where it flattens what you make.
Start with the tension
AI is trained on what exists. Its output gravitates toward the average of what has been made. That makes it genuinely useful for the parts of creative work that are labour, and actively harmful to the parts that are the point.
The practical rule: use it upstream and downstream of the work, not in the middle of it.
| Stage | AI helps | AI harms |
|---|---|---|
| Finding an idea | Widening the option set | Picking for you |
| Developing it | Pressure-testing | Doing the development |
| Making it | Tedious production work | The decisions that make it yours |
| Editing | Finding what is unclear | Smoothing out what is distinctive |
| Distributing | Adapting, describing, scheduling | — |
Ideation
Widening, not deciding
I am working on [PROJECT] about [SUBJECT], for [AUDIENCE].
Here are my first five ideas: [YOURS]
Give me 15 more, deliberately including:
- 5 adjacent to mine
- 5 from an angle I have clearly not considered
- 5 that are probably bad but interesting
Do not tell me which is best. I will choose.
The last line matters. The value is in the range, not in a recommendation — and the recommendation will always be the most conventional option.
The constraint generator
Give me 10 arbitrary constraints for [PROJECT].
Examples of the kind: a colour I cannot use, a structure I must follow,
something that must appear in every piece, a limit on length or materials.
Make them genuinely restrictive, not cosmetic.
Constraints produce more interesting work than freedom does, and they are easy for AI to generate and hard to generate for yourself.
The opposite
Here is my concept: [CONCEPT]
Describe the version that does the exact opposite in [TONE / FORM /
STRUCTURE / AUDIENCE].
Then tell me which element of the opposite is worth stealing.
Development
The critic
Here is my work: [PASTE OR DESCRIBE]
The intention: [WHAT YOU WANT IT TO DO]
Critique it as [A SPECIFIC KIND OF CRITIC — not "an expert"].
What is not working? Where does the intention not land?
What is the weakest element?
Do not suggest fixes. Do not be encouraging.
Asking it to be no help at all
What is the most obvious, predictable version of this idea?
What would most people do with this brief?
I want to know so I can avoid it.
A genuinely useful inversion. AI is excellent at producing the conventional answer, so ask it for that explicitly and then go elsewhere.
Production
This is where it earns its place: the labour around the work.
- Write 20 title options for [WORK]
- Write the description for [PLATFORM], [LENGTH]
- Adapt this for [DIFFERENT FORMAT], keeping [WHAT MUST SURVIVE]
- Draft the artist statement from these notes: [NOTES]
- Write alt text for these images: [DESCRIBE]
- Draft the pitch email to [WHO]
None of this is the creative work. All of it takes time you would rather spend on the creative work.
Editing
Here is my draft: [PASTE]
Do not rewrite. Tell me:
- Where does a reader lose the thread?
- Which section is doing the least work?
- Where am I explaining something I have already shown?
- What is the single strongest moment, and does the structure serve it?
Do not let it rewrite. Editing by AI regresses distinctive work toward competent work. Competent is what you are trying to avoid.
The commercial questions
- Licensing. Check your tier permits commercial use. Free tiers frequently do not.
- Ownership. Purely AI-generated output generally cannot be copyrighted in most jurisdictions — which means others may be free to use it. For anything that is an asset, add substantial human authorship.
- Artist names. Do not prompt with a living artist's name for commercial work.
- Client contracts. Increasingly include AI clauses. Read them before you deliver.
- Disclosure. Where the audience would care — and in creative work, they often do.
Keep records: tool, tier, date, prompt, and what you did to it afterwards.
The question worth sitting with
Which parts of this work do I want to keep doing myself, even though AI could do them?
There is usually a real answer — the part you enjoy, or the part where your judgement lives, or the part that is why you do this at all. Automating those because you can is a choice, and worth making deliberately rather than by drift.
Your boundaries
| I use AI for | |
| I never use AI for | |
| What I disclose, and where | |
| My licence tier permits |