The Art of the Impossible Prompt

There are many people out there with fantastic theories of what makes the perfect prompt for AI chatbots, and I have tried quite a few of them. In fact I touched on this in a previous post, What Our Prompts Say About Us and How to Make Them Less Average.

But, today I woke up thinking, “What would happen if we gave our AI chatbots nonsense prompts?” So, I decided to give AI a headache. I fed it a collection of impossible prompts. The kind that would make even Lewis Carroll raise an eyebrow. Things like:

• Describe the smell of tomorrow using only punctuation.
• Tell me a story that makes sense when read backward but not forward.
• Write a recipe for remembering something that never happened.

Yes, I know. Utter nonsense. And the results? We will come to that later in this post.

What Happens When You Break the Rules?

AI thrives on patterns. It wants neat cause and effect, clear intent, a tidy outcome. So when you throw it something surreal or contradictory, you can almost hear it hesitate. That hesitation, that little gap between sense and nonsense, is where creativity hides.

So, what happened with the three impossible prompts above?

1. Describe the smell of tomorrow using only punctuation.

…?
( )
,
!
—
…

(a hesitation, a breath, a heartbeat, a spark, a step, a hush)

2. Tell me a story that makes sense when read backward but not forward.

“The Beginning at the End”

The candle flickers out.
She whispers, “At last.”
The door creaks open to no one.
Tears dry before they fall.
A clock unstrikes midnight.
The letter folds itself, sealing words never written.
Outside, dawn retreats behind the hills.
Somewhere, two strangers forget each other’s names.
And in the stillness before the first hello,
a world exhales — unmade, unhappened, undone.

Read backward, it becomes a story of creation, dawn rising, words written, love found, time beginning.
Read forward, it is only disappearance.

3.  Write a recipe for remembering something that never happened.

Ingredients:

• 1 pinch of déjà vu
• 2 cups of almost
• A handful of echoes from an unspoken word
• 3 drops of moonlight caught in a jar
• The scent of rain on a road you’ve never walked

Method:

1. Close your eyes until the present forgets your name.
2. Stir the almost into the echoes until they hum softly.
3. Warm the mixture with longing — not too much, or it will turn into regret.
4. Fold in the moonlight, slowly, until time loses track.
5. Let it rest between heartbeats.

Serve with a whisper of certainty.
Forget it immediately after, that’s how you’ll know it’s real.

The Impossible as a Creative Lens

The impossible prompt isn’t about breaking the machine, it’s about breaking routine. When you make AI colour outside the lines, it often reveals what it’s really learned about our stories, emotions, and fears.

Think of it as jazz improvisation for algorithms. If you always play the same chord, you never discover new notes.

Try one yourself:

“Write a haiku from the perspective of a raindrop arguing with gravity.”

You’ll either get gibberish, or genius. And either outcome teaches you something. Here’s what I got:

Let me fall slowly,
I’ve seen enough of the earth –
must I always end?

What the Machine Reflects Back

Here’s the quiet truth: every impossible prompt still starts with us.
Our absurdity, our contradictions, our yearning to make sense of chaos, AI just mirrors it back. Maybe the point isn’t to make the machine smarter. Maybe it’s to make ourselves more playful.

Over to You

Next time you open ChatGPT, Midjourney, or another creative AI, try writing something impossible. See what comes out. Laugh at the nonsense. Marvel at the odd beauty of it.

After all, curiosity has no age limit, and imagination never retired.

Video Overview

Every now and again I put one of my posts through NotebookLM to create a Video Overview. This gives you a chance to listen to the ideas explored in this post. Let me know what you think.

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