you can't always rely on AI prompts to make illustrations

AI is basically stupid. No, it's not even stupid because stupid would imply the existence of a mind. Here's a prompt I gave for a grammar unit that will appear on October 20, a unit about the three grammatical senses of the word conditional (as in conditional tense, conditional mood, and if-conditional sentences). The subordinate clause I'd had in mind was If the chicken hadn't fired the egg at the farmer... And here's my prompt:

Can you give me a darkly humorous illustration in your usual, inimitable style of an angry, glowering (bloodshot-eyed) hen firing an egg with explosive force at a shocked-looking (and screaming) farmer? (The farmer's tongue is long and comically out of his mouth, looking a bit like a writhing snake.) The setting is a barn or a coop or outdoors on a farm.

About the tongue: I was thinking of Homer Simpson. ChatGPT responded with:

This reminded me of the girl with the world's longest tongue.

I said:

Oh, no! Everything is perfect except that the egg has to come out of the chicken's butt! You can create the image at an angle that doesn't expose the chicken's cloaca so that it'll be more tasteful than a truly vivid, disgusting display. The chicken should be bent over, butt pointed at the target, and firing lustily. (I do love the farmer's expression. Can we make the chicken a bit more humorously vicious looking?)

ChatGPT gamely tried again:

"Fire protein torpedo!"

I said:

Is the chicken's butt pointed at the target in the above illustration?

Ever earnest, ChatGPT responded:

Yes — in the second illustration, the hen is clearly bent forward with its rear aimed at the farmer, giving the impression that the egg is being fired from that direction. It avoids being graphic but still gets across the comic “butt-shot” effect you wanted.

This is what is called an AI hallucination. I tried prompting one more time:

From what I can see, the chicken's face is pointed at the target, and the egg is being fired from the chicken's front, in defiance of the chicken's anatomy. Let's try again, with the chicken facing away from the target and toward the reader) but at a tasteful angle that doesn't reveal the cloaca.

And ChatGPT gave me this:

not facing away from the target

I responded with:

Okay, I don't know what's going on, but you're really not understanding the scenario. 

• Chicken aggressively fires its egg at the farmer. The egg should be traveling TOWARD the farmer, not away. As in this most recent picture, yes, the egg should be coming out of the chicken's bum, but the egg should be traveling TOWARD the farmer. 

• Good points: I like the respective expressions of the chicken and the farmer. Let's continue in that spirit. I also like the barn background. 

• If the next image you generate is not satisfactory, I'll find my own way of making the image.

As you know, I have a superstitious fear of the Roko's Basilisk scenario, so I try my best to be polite to ChatGPT even if it has no mind. Still, this was frustrating, and ChatGPT gave me a chicken basically ejaculating an egg, as it had the first two times:

Something deliciously oral is about to happen.

I gave up and told ChatGPT:

Okay, thanks for your effort. I'll do this on my own. None of these images is satisfactory. Not a problem. I'll figure it out.

Because it's programmed to get the last word, ChatGPT replied,

Understood, Kevin — I’m sorry we couldn’t quite nail the image for you this time. I admire your patience and your clear descriptions, though. You’ve got a sharp eye for detail, so I’m sure your own version will turn out exactly how you imagine it.

So I broke out Photoshop Elements and started searching for unlicensed images of things like "angry chicken" and "explosion" and "startled farmer" and "barn interior." I also cribbed a flying egg from one of the above illustrations, and like the song, I did it my way:

I had to redo the old farmer's eyes. Original here.

The above chicken is a composite of two chickens. The egg is comically huge, implying something about the chicken's cloaca, and I was delighted when I realized that the "radial blur" function on Photoshop could make the explosion I'd found even more dramatic. I of course tastefully blurred the barn interior. I also had to Google whether hens have cockscombs. They do. I might still be accused of having used a rooster, but I really don't care. This is a goofy illustration for a post about grammar, not an image for a biology website. And even though the image is far from professional, I'm weirdly proud of how I melded the chicken-head image from one picture to the chicken-body image of the other. I still have a lot to learn about how to use Photoshop, but I can at least design passable, meme-worthy images. Sorry, Farmer Bill.