The Best Negative Prompts for Every AI Model — Copy and Paste

The negative prompt library carries the same material with a test date attached.

On models that do have a negative field, write plain nouns, not sentences: cartoon, blurry, watermark, extra fingers. Never no cartoon or don't make it blurry. The field already means "exclude this" — adding "no" either wastes tokens or, on some models, reads as a description to match. Google states this explicitly for Veo; Kling's field recognises entries as exclusions automatically.

Midjourney has a related trap: --no treats each word separately, so --no water trees is read as "no water" and "no trees", not as one phrase. Use commas.

Black Forest Labs' own prompting guide states: "FLUX.2 does not support negative prompts. Focus on describing what you want, not what you don't want." Not weakly supported. Not supported.

The negative prompts kept below are therefore not a FLUX.2 feature. They are a checklist of the failure modes worth writing against in your positive prompt — which is what BFL tells you to do instead. Read them as "make sure the positive prompt rules these out", not as text to paste into a field that does not exist.

What BFL says to do instead — their documented framework is Subject + Action + Style + Context, and word order carries weight: the model attends most to what comes first. Their recommended lengths are 10–30 words for quick concepts, 30–80 words for most work, 80+ only for genuinely complex scenes. So "no plastic skin" becomes "visible pores, subsurface scattering, uneven natural skin tone" — placed early, not appended at the end.

FLUX dev and schnell are guidance-distilled. The guidance behaviour was baked into the weights during distillation, and they run at CFG 1. Classifier-free guidance is the mechanism that pushes a generation away from your negative prompt — at CFG 1 that mechanism is not weak, it is absent. Your negative prompt is not applied faintly. It is not applied.

The guidance value you set on FLUX is not CFG, even though every interface calls it something similar. It is a distilled stand-in: a FLUX guidance of 3–4 approximates what CFG 7 did on older models, but it carries no negative conditioning. Raising it does not switch negatives back on.

This is why people paste a long negative into a FLUX workflow, see no change, and conclude the terms were wrong. The terms were never read. Workarounds exist — dynamic thresholding nodes force true CFG above 1 — but results are inconsistent and cost roughly double the compute per image.

What to do instead on distilled models: everything has to move into the positive prompt. Not "no plastic skin" but "visible pores, subsurface scattering, uneven natural skin tone." You are not blocking an outcome, you are describing the one you want precisely enough to crowd the default out.

There is no negative_prompt field in Seedance. Every exclusion you write sits inside the same prompt as your positive direction, competing for the same attention. That single architectural fact drives everything below.

The failure is contradiction, not inversion. A widely repeated version of this warning says Seedance "misreads negatives and does the opposite." That is not what the evidence shows, and it is worth being precise about. What actually happens is that a long generic list ends up arguing with your own positive prompt. Exclude "blur" while asking for shallow depth of field. Exclude "camera shake" while asking for handheld. Exclude "scene cuts" while asking for a sequence. The model has to resolve a contradiction you wrote, and which side wins is not predictable — which looks like the model doing the opposite on purpose.

Positive phrasing wins for anything describable. The published guidance is consistent here: state the outcome instead of banning its absence. Not "no chaotic camera" but "camera locked at waist height, restrained movement." Not "not blurry" but "subject held in sharp focus, motion blur confined to fast background elements." A positive instruction tells the model what to build; a negative only tells it what to avoid, and leaves the choice of replacement open.

Keep a negative line, but keep it short. Reserve it for failures that make a clip unusable and that have no positive phrasing — subtitles appearing, a duplicated subject, a hard cut, a logo changing, new people entering frame. Five or six of those beat eighteen generic ones.

Fix what broke, not what might. ByteDance's own guidance is diagnostic rather than preventive: if a face drifted, address identity; if the product changed shape, protect the product. Do not pre-load exclusions for problems you have not seen in your own output.

And there is a placement rule. ByteDance's published Seedance template, on their own Dreamina platform, keeps exclusions "short, concrete, and grouped at the end" — in a single Avoid [...] clause, placed after a positive Preserve [identity, wardrobe, logo, object geometry] clause. Say what must survive first, what must not happen second, and keep them in one place rather than sprinkled through the prompt. Scattered exclusions are what start arguing with the positive direction.

This is the one model where the folklore is literally true, and it is the vendor saying it. Runway's own Gen-4 prompting guides state that negative prompts are not supported, and that "including a negative prompt may result in the opposite happening." Their instruction is blunt: "Avoid negative prompting, such as no clouds in the sky, for the best prompt adherence."

So writing "no watermark, no text overlay" into a Runway prompt is not neutral and not merely ineffective — by the vendor's own account it can summon the thing you banned. If you have been pasting a generic negative block into Runway and getting the artifacts anyway, this is why.

What Runway says to do instead: full sentences in natural language, structured as subject → action → setting → camera → motion over time → style. Simple prompts already work; extra length buys stylistic control, not obedience. Every exclusion has to be re-expressed as something present — not "no crowd" but "an empty platform, no other figures in frame" phrased as a description of emptiness rather than a ban on people.