- Why "just be quirky" doesn't work
- The five-step method I use
- A real example: the postcard llama that started this whole thing
- Words that make ChatGPT get weird
- Prompt formulas you can steal today
- Using this for actual portraits and headshots, not just novelty images
- The uncomfortable bit nobody selling prompt packs wants to say
- A quick note on where this fits into real content work
- Frequently asked questions
- Official documentation
The short version: ChatGPT is brilliant at inventing quirky image prompts because it can combine unrelated ideas faster than you can, but the trick is feeding it strange constraints, not asking it to "be creative." Give it a job, a mood, a material, and one deliberately wrong detail, and the images stop looking like every other AI picture on the internet. I use a five-step method that gets me a usable, weird prompt in under two minutes.
Why "just be quirky" doesn't work
I typed "give me a quirky image prompt" into ChatGPT one Sunday morning last month, purely to test it before writing this. It gave me: "A whimsical cat wearing a tiny wizard hat, sitting on a stack of books, surrounded by floating magical sparkles." That's not quirky. That's the default output of every AI art tool since 2023. Cats in hats. Sparkles. Whimsy as a genre.
The problem isn't ChatGPT. It's the instruction. "Quirky" and "fun" are moods, not information. A model trained on billions of images has learned that "quirky" statistically correlates with cats, hats, and pastel sparkles, so that's what it gives you when you ask for the mood without the substance. If you want something that surprises you, you have to describe a scene the model hasn't seen a thousand times, not a vibe it already has a template for.
The five-step method I use
Here's the exact process, step by step, that I use when I'm building a batch of image prompts for a client's social content or for my own newsletter graphics.
- Step 1: Pick an ordinary object or job. Not a dragon. A parking meter, a dentist, a lawnmower, a middle manager.
- Step 2: Pick a wrong time period or setting for it. Victorian era, 1970s disco, deep sea, medieval banquet.
- Step 3: Add one physically impossible or absurd detail. It's made of jelly, it's the size of a bus, it's having an argument with itself.
- Step 4: Tell ChatGPT the art style you want, by name. Not "artistic." Say "1950s travel poster," "risograph print," "Victorian etching," "claymation still."
- Step 5: Ask ChatGPT to write it as a full sentence prompt, then ask it to give you three variations. This is the step most people skip, and it's the one that gets you options instead of one flat idea.
That's it. Five steps, and you'll have something strange in about ninety seconds, because ChatGPT is fast at combining the four inputs once you've given it real ones instead of a mood word.
A real example: the postcard llama that started this whole thing
I'll tell you exactly how this played out for me, because it's a better teacher than any theory. I was stuck for a header image for a client newsletter about accounting software ( one of the driest topics I've worked on this year). Rather than another stock photo of a laptop and a coffee cup, I ran my own method: object (an accountant), setting (a 1930s seaside postcard), absurd detail (the accountant is a llama wearing a green visor and holding a ledger three times its size), style (vintage travel postcard, faded colours, "Greetings from" typography).
I typed all four of those into ChatGPT and asked it to write the full prompt. It came back with something close to: "A vintage 1930s seaside travel postcard illustration titled 'Greetings from the Ledger Coast,' featuring a llama wearing a green accountant's visor, hunched over an oversized leather ledger three times its size, faded sepia and teal tones, sun-bleached typography, gentle grain texture." I ran that through the image generator and got, on the first try, one of the most shared images that client had posted all year, 340 likes on a LinkedIn post that usually gets 40. The llama did more work than any stock photo ever would have.
That's the pattern worth stealing. It wasn't "make it fun." It was four boring, specific inputs that added up to something nobody else was posting that week.
Words that make ChatGPT get weird
Some words consistently push the model away from generic and towards distinctive. I keep a running list, and these are the ones that earn their place in almost every quirky prompt I write:
- Material swaps: "made entirely of felt," "carved from soap," "built out of stained glass," "knitted."
- Scale jokes: "the size of a wardrobe," "small enough to fit in a teacup," "seven feet tall."
- Era mashups: "Regency era but with neon," "1980s corporate office in ancient Rome," "medieval but everyone has a smartphone."
- Named art styles instead of adjectives: "risograph," "linocut," "Bauhaus poster," "1990s Trapper Keeper illustration," "German expressionist film still."
- Specific lighting: "lit only by a single desk lamp," "harsh flash photography," "golden hour through venetian blinds."
If you want a deeper library of these, I've laid out a much longer set of vocabulary specifically for getting more out of your prompts in this list of descriptive words for ChatGPT prompts, and it works just as well for image prompts as it does for the business writing it was built for.
If you haven't tried it yet, here's my look at the Perchance AI image generator and how it works. My guide to a ChatGPT photo to cartoon prompt is a good starting point.
Prompt formulas you can steal today
If you'd rather not build from scratch every time, here are formulas I reuse constantly, each one filled in with a real example so you can see the shape of it.
- Formula: [ordinary job] + [wrong century] + [art style]. Example: "a traffic warden in ancient Egypt, carved stone relief style."
- Formula: [animal] + [human job] + [oddly specific setting]. Example: "a pigeon working as a hotel concierge, standing behind a 1920s art deco front desk."
- Formula: [household object] + [emotion] + [dramatic lighting]. Example: "a toaster having an existential crisis, lit like a film noir interrogation scene."
- Formula: [everyday scene] + [one wrong material]. Example: "a family dinner where the entire table and food are made of stained glass."
Ask ChatGPT to run any of these formulas with a topic relevant to your business. I've had a bakery client get more engagement from "a croissant on a Victorian throne, oil painting style" than from a single food photo they'd paid a photographer for.
Using this for actual portraits and headshots, not just novelty images
Quirky doesn't have to mean silly. The same method works if you're building portrait-style prompts for a personal brand and want something more distinctive than the flat, over-lit "professional headshot" look everyone gets. Swap the absurd detail for a specific era, texture, or lighting choice instead of a joke, and you get portraits with real character rather than the generic corporate render. I've written a full separate guide on exactly how to write portrait style prompts for ChatGPT image generation if that's the direction you want to take this.
The uncomfortable bit nobody selling prompt packs wants to say
Here's the part most people writing about this skip, because it doesn't sell a product. A lot of the "500 quirky ChatGPT image prompts" lists circulating online were written once, by one person, then copied and reworded by a dozen other sites. That's why you'll spot the same cat-in-a-hat, same steampunk owl, same "cyberpunk fox" showing up everywhere from Pinterest boards to LinkedIn carousels. The prompts aren't quirky anymore. They've become the new stock photography, recognisable and tired in exactly the way they were meant to avoid.
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The uncomfortable truth is that quirky only lasts until it gets shared enough times to become a template. Which means the actual skill here isn't finding a good prompt once. It's building your own small, personal method for generating new ones on demand, using your own random inputs, so you're never fishing from the same pool as everyone else scrolling the same "best AI prompts" article. The five-step method above works precisely because it forces you to supply your own object, era, and absurd detail rather than borrowing someone else's.
A quick note on where this fits into real content work
I use this constantly for social headers, email graphics, and thumbnail images, and it's saved me and my clients real money on stock photo subscriptions and one-off illustration commissions. It's not a replacement for a proper brand illustration when you need consistency across fifty assets, but for one-off, scroll-stopping images, ninety seconds with ChatGPT beats a £40 stock photo licence every single time.
I have written more around this on the site: How to Write Portrait Style Prompts for ChatGPT Image Generation, Unlock Your ChatGPT Potential: 200 Descriptive Words for Crafting Impactful Business Prompts.
Related guides live in the ChatGPT Prompts and Limits: 30 Guides to Fun Prompts, Photo Edits and Daily Caps.
If you want your own numbers, use the free tool that writes the prompt for you.
Related reading: fun chat prompts.
Frequently asked questions
Can ChatGPT generate the images itself, or just write the prompts?
ChatGPT (through GPT-4o's image tools) can both write the prompt and generate the image in the same conversation, so you don't need to copy the text into a separate tool, though you're welcome to if you prefer another image generator's style.
What makes a prompt "quirky" rather than just random?
Quirky prompts combine something ordinary with something deliberately mismatched, like a boring job in the wrong century or an everyday object made from the wrong material, whereas random prompts just throw unrelated words together with no internal logic for the model to work from.
Why do my ChatGPT image prompts keep coming out generic?
Nearly always because the prompt uses mood words like "fun," "quirky," or "creative" instead of concrete nouns, materials, eras, and named art styles, so the model defaults to whatever it has seen most often for that vague request.
How many prompt variations should I ask ChatGPT for at once?
Three is usually the right number. Fewer and you don't have real options to compare, more and you'll spend longer picking than you would have spent just writing a second prompt from scratch.
