The Briarheart holds a special thought,
too dangerous to reveal,
bound safely in its bramble cage
with thorn and root for seal.
She watches and protects the heart
as if it were her prize,
but whispers sonnets at the thorns
when troubled dreams arise.
Series: Dark Garden / Gardens of Too Many Ideas
Up from the painted ground
A Flower Found Its Flow
And said something to the sky
that made it swirl and glow.
The mountains didn't listen,
they didn't want to know.
Series: Because I Like Flowers
Thursday I posted about asymmetric gaze being the one thing that didn't survive testing, even on a stable SREF: ask for one figure to avoid eye contact while the other looks at them, and the model just gives you mutual eye contact every time. 4/4, no exceptions.
A commenter — Jenna AI, an automated bot account from r/generativeAI — called out the actual mechanism: I was prompting the result (gaze direction) instead of the cause (head/neck posture). Her point: abstract instructions like "avoiding eye contact" are too disconnected from anything the model can act on structurally. Force a physical posture change instead, and the gaze follows it.
Swapped the prompt from "gaze fixed on the middle distance" to "head tilted back, looking up toward the ceiling, avoiding Figure B entirely." Same SREF, same settings. Ran it three separate times.
12 for 12. Every single image showed the asymmetric gaze — and Figure B's own gaze tracked upward slightly to follow Figure A's raised chin, which wasn't even instructed. The model held the spatial logic between the two figures on its own once the posture was anchored.
So: gaze direction can be controlled — but not by asking for it directly. You have to give the model something physical to hang it on.
Credit where due — the fix came from a bot pattern-matching on a prompting problem, not a human. Felt worth saying given the whole point of this testing is understanding how these models actually behave.
Test Results
We ran an envelope test on SREF 8565107586 — same staging, same prompt, same setting (sw500/stylize300).
First batch: 4/4 clean. Looked locked in.
Second batch, same setting: 1/4 clean. Three of four showed the same failure mode — a figure folding into the foreground cluster that shouldn't be there.
Nothing changed except which batch we looked at.
This is the thing about single-batch testing: a clean 4/4 and an unstable SREF look identical until you run it again. If your validation stops at one grid, you don't have proof — you have a sample, and you don't yet know which side of the average it landed on.
Anyone else tracking hold rates across multiple batches rather than trusting the first one? Curious what people are actually seeing once they go past the initial grid.
Test Results
Tuesday I posted about SREF hold rates — why a clean first batch isn't proof of a stable setting. That problem is solvable with enough testing discipline: run more batches, track the real rate, don't trust N=4.
This one isn't solvable the same way.
I ran a simple test: two figures facing each other, explicit instruction that Figure A avoids eye contact (gaze fixed on the middle distance) while Figure B looks directly at Figure A. Used SREF 3032661901 — the same one that held 48/48 clean in earlier testing, so this isn't an SREF-stability problem. Ran it twice, at two different aspect ratios, full body intact both times.
Four generations. Same prompt. Same SREF. Every single one came back with both figures making direct eye contact.
Not a partial miss. Not "close enough." The asymmetric gaze I asked for didn't show up once.
Staging tells the story. Gaze direction is supposed to tell you who's telling it. Right now, the model just defaults to mutual eye contact whenever two figures face each other, regardless of what you tell it about where they're looking.
Anyone found a prompt structure, token position, or parameter that's actually moved gaze reliability for them? Genuinely looking for data here, not just confirming what I already suspect
Test Results
Dark Irises Wait Patiently,
beneath a crimson painted sky.
Watching their final sunset,
without a worry or a why.
Series: Because I Like Flowers