What “8k” Does to Your Prompts

IN WHICH WE WILL LEARN:

The difference between what people who use 8k in prompts think 8k means and what Stable Diffusion thinks it means
The difference between those two things and what 8k really means
The difference between all those things and what 8k actually does in a prompt
The difference between 2k, 4k, 16k, 32k, 64k, 128k, 256k, and 512k
How to fashionably pair a corset and pauldrons. Hint: it helps to be a Redhead Space Marine.

This article is a continuation of “In the Style of Greg Rutkowski’ Is Bad for Hot Babes.” It is recommended, but not required, that you read that post first.

This is your bikini babe on “in the style of Greg Rutkowski.”
Any Questions?

The whole Greg Rutkowski thing

is entirely out of hand. And don’t get me started about “photorealistic“; I can’t even. But the promptlets I am the most suspicious of are the ‘K’s.

They were among the first Words of Power I saw.

I encountered my first in a place I would see it many times after: almost at the end of a prompt, sandwiched between “photorealistic” and “Unreal Engine.” It was 8K. I will admit that I tried it at once. The difference was astounding. It was as if angels had descended from heaven and wiped a layer of grime from my image, leaving only its truest inner beauty.

Nah, that’s BS. Actually, I don’t remember what it did to the images I tried it on. It must have done something, though, because I used it , along with 4k and occasionally 16k in a lot of my early Midjourney prompts. I remember being told that the each had a specific effect in specific situations, but I do not remember what. I think 8k might have been for CGI and 4k for photos, or vice/versa..

I only gave 8k and its ilk up when I switched to Dream by Wombo. Dream’s 200-character limit and pre-built styles made me question my reliance on the many “beautifying” crutches I had used on Midjourney. (I am ashamed to admit that even though I was told it does nothing in Dream, I kept putting Midjourney’s best trick at the time, –test(p) –creative –upbeta –upbeta, at the end of my prompts for weeks, convinced that they still did something. They didn’t.)

The few times I tried it in Dream,

8k didn’t seem to have as much of an effect as I had thought it had on Midjourney. I chalked it up to Dream’s relative lack of sophistication compared to Midjourney – the app had only recently added Stable Diffusion 1.1-based styles to its library of VQGAN-based styles. I imagined what my renders would look like once Stable Diffusion, and thus Dream, got a little better and could properly use 8K and its ilk. Something that improved your prompt but only used two characters would be perfect for Dream’s 200-character limit.

That was enough-time-to-gestate-a-human-ago.

Stable Diffusion has long since passed Midjourney in total functionality, and possibly image quality (though this is hotly debated). Dream doesn’t have quite as many bells and whistles as Stable Diffusion, but its image quality can be as good or better, depending on what style you are using in Dream, and how complicated your workflow is in Stable Diffusion. Certainly, both are far better than Midjourney was back in the fall of 2022. So 8k should work just fine now, right?

More importantly, I can “look under the hood” of Stable Diffusion now. I can look up prompts that use 8K on Lexica.art and PromptHero.com and see how well they work in Stable Diffusion. More importantly, I can find out what Stable Diffusion associates with 8k on HaveIBeenTrained.com.

Lexica’s results are… repetitive.

90% of them are 60% synthwave/ glowwave landscapes/cityscapes/ abstracts (50% of which don’t even mention 8k), and 40% some variation of :

[Woman worshipped by AI Art Bros], highly detailed, digital painting, artstation, concept art, smooth, sharp focus, illustration, art by greg rutkowski, artgerm and alphonse mucha, high def digital art, in the style of ilya kuvshinov and ross tran.

The rest are little girls (It’s never little boys; it’s always little girls) and kawaii critters.

None of the women, girls, or critters actually have 8k in the prompt, but between them they have almost every other trendy shibboleth, so I guess Lexica just decided that they might as well have 8k as well?

In other news, Lexica does this for pretty much everything I have ever searched for there. Why, Lexica? Why do you hate accurate results?

Prompt Hero has much better

and more varied results. And I mean super duper varied. This one here might be the most “varied” prompt I have ever read. And by “varied,” I mean “What in the Great Cthulu fucking fuck?”

Kill It! Kill It With Fire!
It’s The Wrongest Prompt Ever.

Back to 8k…

There’s not much more to say about Prompt Hero. I didn’t see much improvement in the quality of images between the 8k results and their normal results. Also, a majority of their users do not know how to stay within the 77-token limit for Stable Diffusion, and a select few of their certified Prompt Hero PROs^TM post the creepiest pictures of little girls I have seen so far.

What does Stable Diffusion associate with ‘8k’?

Maybe it’s futuristic so-hi-def-your-eyes-orgasm TVs. I’ve seen them. Licked one. They are amazing – if you sit less than 2 feet away from your TV. Any farther, and there is functionally no difference between a 65″ 4k TV and an 8k one. The same thing happens at 4 and a half feet to 4k in relation to 1080p TVs, BTW. The human eye is incapable of telling the difference between them any further than that. Spend your TV money on OLED and HDR instead.

Maybe it’s the still photography 8k or people shooting 8k videos. 8k translates to just over 33 megapixels.There are tons of cameras that can take 33+ megapixel pictures, and even a few that can record 8k video. Most of the big consumer brands like Canon, Sony, Nikon, etc, have at least one camera that can shoot 8k video. Samsung and a few others even have 8k video cameras on their flagship phones.

What are the people shooting 8k on their phones doing with the footage? You can’t watch it on your phone – no phone has an 8k display, and only a handful of Sony phones even have 4k displays. You can upload it to YouTube, which supports 8k video, and there are a few 8k computer monitors to watch it on, but if you have to be two feet away from a 65-inch screen to see the difference between 8k and 4k, with a 32-inch computer monitor, you’d have to be about six inches from the screen to see a difference. If there were an 8k phone, that distance would shrink to less than an inch.

So many rants, so little post space.

Now that we know why people who buy 8k video products are stupid, What about people like naive young Alzakex who use it in our prompts? You may have noticed that when I showed you Lexica’s and Prompt Hero’s results for an ‘8k’ search, I didn’t include the ultimate authority, Have I Been Trained. I even sabotaged HIBT’s link to save you from being spoiled. That’s because their results are so hilarious I needed to put them after this page break.

Topless Velociraptor