I used ChatGPT to write AI art prompts to illustrate a short story.

The results were surprising, and I’ll show you how I did it

Heather Cooper
4 min readDec 24, 2022
A road splitting into two parts as the story unfolds.
Created by Author, with Midjourney

Creating or choosing images for your articles and stories is often time-consuming and frustrating.

It’s even more difficult if you don’t have a background in design.

What if you could use your text to generate images based on the descriptive language in your writing?

I got a chance to experiment with this theory, and the results were surprising.

I’ll show you why.

Developing an idea

I got a request from a Medium writer Francisco to create an image for his short story.

I’ve been writing about AI art generators and ChatGPT, so it was a good opportunity to find a new way to use these new tools. I used ChatGPT to write 3 prompts to represent the descriptive text about his story’s main character, background, and setting.

I copied and pasted 219 words from his story into ChatGPT after the prompt below:

Write 3 different prompts for an AI art generator using Stable Diffusion to create an image that represents this story: “She was 21 then. Ten years had passed. She was now…”

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Heather Cooper

AI Educator & Consultant | Exploring the creation of innovative visual content & storytelling. Let’s connect: https://heatherbcooper.com