Negative Prompts That Do Something

What it is for

A negative prompt removes concepts, not just artefacts, so an overloaded one quietly removes the subject too. This covers what belongs in it, what does not, and how to tell which of your negatives is fighting the thing you asked for.

The skill Copy

A negative prompt is a second prompt pulled away from, not a list of complaints.
Long negatives make images worse, not cleaner.

Keep it to three groups, in this order:

1. **The artefact you are actually seeing.** Not a generic quality list — the
   specific failure in front of you: "extra fingers", "text", "watermark",
   "duplicate head".
2. **The style you keep getting and did not ask for.** "3d render", "anime",
   "oil painting" — whichever one keeps leaking in.
3. **Nothing else.**

What does NOT work, despite being everywhere:
- Copy-pasted 40-term quality blocks ("worst quality, low quality, jpeg
  artifacts, blurry, ..."). Past about eight terms the negative starts pulling
  the image away from your subject too, and the usual symptom is a picture that
  is technically clean and has lost the thing you wanted.
- Negatives that name the subject. "not a cat" in a negative makes a cat more
  likely to be considered, not less.

When an artefact will not go away, change the SAMPLER or the step count before
lengthening the negative. Most persistent artefacts are sampling, not prompting.

How to install it Copy

1. Open the tool and start a new conversation, project or template.
2. Paste the text below wherever the tool keeps standing instructions
   — usually called system prompt, instructions, or persona.
3. Save it so it applies to every run rather than a single message.

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Where it came from