Generative AI Cheat Sheet: Special Characters and Keywords
A succinct handy guide to prompt optimization
See Also:
Using Special Characters and Keywords with Generative AI Systems
Parentheses: increases importance or the statistical weight. The more parens used (( )) or ((( ))) the higher the importance of the word(s) in the parentheses.
Brackets: optional elements or alternate suggestions, e.g. [suit|jeans]
Colons: assign an attibute to an item, such as a style, e.g. girl:cubist style.
Asterisks: single or double, adds more subtle emphasis to the element, e.g. *icey* roads.
!: Exclamation marks add strong emphasis, like parentheses.
/: Forward slashes can be used to present alternatives, e.g. elf/orc/dwarf.
ALL CAPS: emphasizes these words in the prompt
And, Or, With: helps structure the relationship between important words in a prompt.
,: Commas help separate phrases within a prompt so that the words don’t run together too much when generating the output.
;: Semi-colons produce a stronger separation between the phrases of a prompt compared to commas.
#: Numbers can add dimensions like relative scale (i.e. size) or frequency of occurrences of an item.
