Most people treat AI like a vending machine for ideas. Type “give me 101 options,” scroll, pick one, move on. This approach does something different, and it gets you out of creative ruts much faster.
The idea comes from a musician on r/PromptEngineering who was building music videos for their songs. They didn’t want literal visuals. A lyric about a broken heart shouldn’t turn into a picture of a broken heart. They wanted something abstract that captures the feeling. That kind of concept is hard to come up with, so they started using AI as a roadblock breaker instead of an idea printer.
The key idea: the AI doesn’t need to give you the right answer. It just needs to get your brain moving again.
The old way vs. the new way
The old way (level one): You ask for a big list of ideas. The model happily vomits out associated concepts. Sometimes idea 69 is a winner. Often you get a pile of safe, generic options that all feel the same. You scroll, skim, and settle for the first one that doesn’t annoy you. Nothing about your own thinking changed, so you’re stuck again an hour later.
The new way: You stop asking for more ideas and start changing how the model thinks about your problem. Each prompt below pushes it in a different direction, so you get contrast instead of volume.
6 prompts to try 🧭
- Brainstorm with real spread. “Give me ten completely different directions for this project.” The word “different” does the work here. You want ten distinct paths, not ten flavors of one.
- Research how others solved it. “Find artists who have solved similar creative problems. What techniques did they use, and why did they work?” You get borrowed solutions plus the reasoning behind them. Push for specifics you can steal, like a director who repeats one color to signal grief.
- Check the current trends. “What are people doing creatively right now? What seems to resonate, and what feels overdone?” The “overdone” half is the useful part, because it tells you what to avoid.
- Use negative constraints. “I don’t want this, this, or this. Find me something interesting that avoids all three.” For a heartbreak song, that might mean no rain, no shattered glass, no empty chairs. Fencing off the obvious forces the model out of its default lane.
- Go somewhere strange. “Give me three ideas that sound almost wrong. Ideas I probably wouldn’t have considered.” One commenter called this trick slept on, and I agree. Slightly off-target concepts often shake loose something better than the obvious stuff.
- Hand over the wheel. “Stop following my existing vision. Take this somewhere you find interesting, and I’ll react.” Reacting is easier than creating from a blank page.
A commenter added a nice twist on number 4: have the model generate ten ideas, then forbid it from using any of them and force it to combine the two worst ones. Weird, but that’s the point.
The skill nobody talks about
Here’s the part I liked most. The more you work with these models, the more you notice their habits. The same metaphors keep showing up. The same predictable symbolism. The same narrative shapes. A lot of pretty, generic output.
Spotting those habits is a skill. Once you can tell “genuinely interesting” from “remix of its favorite patterns,” you can steer on purpose. You write better constraints. You ban the clichés before they show up. You push the model into territory it wouldn’t pick by itself. Keep a running note of what you see, and after a few sessions the patterns get obvious.
How to put this into practice
- Write down your creative problem in two sentences.
- Run prompt 1 and prompt 4 first. They are the quickest to show whether the model is stuck in a rut.
- Make a short list of the clichés you keep seeing (the recurring metaphors, the same imagery). Add them to your “avoid” list.
- Run prompt 5 or 6 when you need a real surprise.
- Pick one odd result and react to it. Keep what excites you, throw out the rest. Then follow up with something like “push that further” and see where it lands.
One honest caveat from the original post: AI doesn’t replace time. Go for a walk. Take a shower. Study artists you admire. Live your life and collect experiences. Your brain needs that processing time, and no prompt substitutes for it.
But a creative roadblock no longer has to mean the day is lost. 🚀
Your turn
Pick one of the six prompts and try it on whatever you’re stuck on today. Then tell me which one cracked it open, or share your own trick. I’m always collecting more tools for the toolbelt.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What if the ‘almost wrong’ ideas come out too random to use?
Don’t ask for random. Ask for ideas that feel slightly off-target for your specific project, then keep the one that makes you flinch a little. One commenter found that these near-miss concepts shake loose far more interesting options than the obvious list does.
Q: What if the model keeps giving me the same safe ideas, even with negative constraints?
Generate ten ideas first, then tell the model it can’t use any of them. Next, ask it to combine the two weakest ideas from that list into one concept. Commenters say the mashup usually lands somewhere weirder and more useful than anything on the first list.
Q: How do I get an abstract music video concept without the lyrics being acted out literally?
Ask for treatments in a completely different genre from the song, like a horror trailer cut for a love song. The genre clash pushes the model away from literal illustration and toward the emotion underneath. You can also feed it reference images with no captions and ask what the emotional throughline is, since it often spots connections you didn’t notice.
Use AI creatively to get UNSTUCK.
by u/Outrageous_Bid5910 in PromptEngineering