Expert insight: Crafting AI prompts builds descriptive writing skills
Comparative literature PhD candidate Lei Yu argues that writing prompts for image generators revives the descriptive craft of modernist novelists.
Lei Yu, a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Western, argues that anyone fine-tuning a prompt for an image generator such as Midjourney is practising an old literary skill: turning a mental picture or a mood into precise language. The essay first ran in The Conversation and is republished by Western News.
Yu draws on literary scholar Dora Zhang’s book Strange Likeness. When photography and cinema captured surfaces faster than prose could, Zhang argues, modernist writers such as Henry James, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf turned to atmosphere, sensation and mood. Earlier realists like Balzac and Dickens had described rooms and streets in exhaustive detail.
Generative AI, Yu says, has reversed that history. Users must now describe objects and also the diffuse quality internet culture calls a vibe, so prompt writing combines realist description with modernist evocation.
Yu concludes that AI has not ended writing and has instead spread one of its oldest skills across everyday life.
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