Use Your Words: Teaching Prompt Engineering (Google's Whisk)

Whisk is a "new experimental tool that lets you use images as prompts to visualize your ideas and tell your story." Everyone knows the phrase, "a picture is worth one hundred words." Never has that been more true than when using generative AI tools to create images. I had the opportunity to trial Google Lab's Whisk tool this morning. I loved it. Fun. Whimsical. Educational.

Goal: Use a combination of images and text to create short (8 second) animations.

My project: create a quick animation of a bengal cat eating sushi at the beach.

Here is what I loved about the application:

1. Guided process. The user interface is intuitive (and playful). We all know firsthand—and science reinforces—that being creative is difficult with a blank page. We do better when given instructions or prompts to get us started. Whisk does so by first laying out the three to four key steps.
   

2. Not a zero-shot deal. The tool shows the generated images at each stage. If you don't like what you see, you can just back up. You can edit at each stage.
   

3. Mixture of text, images, and options. Users can upload photos for subject, scene, and style. This is where images can save a lot of time. Many of us "know it when we see it." It is harder for many of us to describe in detail what we want.
   

4. Prompt abstraction. The tool does most of the heavy lifting in terms of engaging with the tool to create images, scenes, and animations. I typed just a few sentences to create my animation of a Bengal cat eating sushi at the beach. I don't even want to imagine the ultimate prompt.
   

5. Quick. Photo uploads didn't take longer than any other applications. Generating the 8-second videos seemed to take about a minute—or less.

   
   

Bengal Cat eating sushi at the beach (Whisk)

The tool gives you the opportunity to type in a prompt, see the results, and adjust, edit, or add to the prompt. Despite Whisk's tools and abstractions, it is easy for me to internalize how much of a skill set writing prompts is and how much I have to learn.