Getting the most out of artificial intelligence tools comes down to wording your prompt. Yes you can customize settings or tweak the options buttons, but at the heart its taking something you type and turning it into something completely different.
The same rule applies whether you are turning a piece of text into an orchestral masterwork in Google’s MusicFX or creating a poster for a yard sale in Ideogram.
I grew up in the eras of technology magazines giving you cheat codes to try, stapling floppy disks to the front of the cover and providing download links written out in long, complex URLs.
To bring us to a new era I thought I’d share a series of fun prompts to try out on your AI tools of choice, covering a theme across image, video and text.
Making a story for a friend
Lets start with the text. I’ve tried to create these prompts to work regardless of whether you’ve used Google Gemini, OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, GroqChat or Anthropic’s Claude.
For this prompt we’re going to craft a fun, short story for a child in your life. It could be a son, daughter, niece, nephew, godchild, alien you adopted as your ward or even a fury baby.
To use the prompt just replace [name], [age] and either an [object or thing] with information pertinent to your chosen muse and paste it into your chatbot of the day.
Here is the prompt, just copy it and replace the bits in [] with your own information:
"Write a captivating story about [name], a [age]-year-old, who wakes up to find they can speak with [object or thing], embarking on a day filled with fun, challenges, and newfound friendships."
The opening line of my own story (Ryan, age 42, mushrooms): “Ryan, a 42-year-old with a curious mind and a gentle heart, woke up one peculiar morning to a soft, murmuring sound that seemed to emanate from his garden.”
Write a captivating story about [name], a [age]-year-old, who wakes up to find they can speak with [object or thing], embarking on a day filled with fun, challenges, and newfound friendships.You can try this prompt on Claude 2, ChatGPT, Gemini, GroqChat, Copilot, Pi and more.
Making an image for your story
Next up every good story needs an image, even if its just for the book jacket. So I’ve also crafted a prompt for you to try, based on our story, to get an image.
"Create an image of [name], [age] years old, discovering the magical ability to communicate with [object or thing], showcasing a whimsical and adventurous scene filled with fun, challenges, and the beginnings of a unique friendship."
I tried the prompt in MidJourney, DALL-E 3 and Adobe Firefly and in each case got a whimsical, magical world filled with mushrooms. Don’t forget to swap out name, age and object for your own information or you’ll get a very generic picture.
Create an image of [name], [age] years old, discovering the magical ability to communicate with [object or thing], showcasing a whimsical and adventurous scene filled with fun, challenges, and the beginnings of a unique friendship.You can try this prompt on ChatGPT (requires subscription), Gemini (certain countries only), Copilot, MidJourney, Ideogram, FreePik, Leonardo, NightCafe, Adobe Firefly and more.
Putting song to your story
What better way to round off a fun story than we’ve music. Suno AI lets you generate up to about a minute of music based on a simple text prompt. So lets craft a prompt.
"Compose a song about [name], a [age]-year-old, who wakes up to the magical ability to speak with [object or thing], weaving tales of adventure, challenges, and newfound friendships. Make it [genre]."
Don’t forget to change the information. If you want to select a genre just type the genre at the end, although this might push you over the character limit, in which case remove everything after [object or thing] and add in [genre] style.
I tried it without genre and the two songs it generated had different genres. The first was an acoustic folk storytelling style, the other a whimsical comedy folk. Putting it in a UK grime style was something of an experience — especially being called the mushroom whisperer.
If you tried out any of these prompts drop me an email, leave a comment or tag me on social media and I’ll take a look.
Compose a song about [name], a [age]-year-old, who wakes up to the magical ability to speak with [object or thing], weaving tales of adventure. Make it [genre].You can try this prompt on Copilot, Suno, Google MusicFX (some countries), Cassette AI, AudioGen, Stable Audio and Soundful.
