June 7, 2023
Prompt Fatigue: Why Creators Are Returning to Constraints in 2026
A designer told me she spent forty minutes rewriting a single prompt trying to get an image generator to produce a hand holding a coffee cup correctly. Forty minutes. She could have drawn it in ten. That story is becoming common enough to have a name. People are calling it prompt fatigue, and it describes something more interesting than a technical complaint about extra fingers. It is the exhaustion of infinite choice with no friction attached to any of it. When every possible image is one sentence away, the sentence stops feeling like a creative act and starts feeling like
