Make AI
Look Like Us.
A working cheat sheet for getting AI tools to render Black features, hair, skin, and culture the way they actually exist — not the way the machine assumed they did. Specific words. Specific phrases. Specific techniques. Built by people who got tired of fighting the defaults.
The machine doesn't know us by default.
Specificity is the answer.
Generic AI is generic because it was trained on generic. Every problem in this guide gets solved the same way — by giving the machine more accurate words to work with than it had on its own. Skin tone, undertone, finish. Hair texture, style, technique. Settings, props, references. Three layers, one prompt.
Built by people who live this.
Not a manifesto. Not a hot take. A working document, written by stylists, photographers, and creators who got tired of seeing the same five faces, the wig problem, the lightening default, the cultural blanking. The vocabulary in this guide comes from the chair, the booth, the studio, and the cookout — not from a content team.
Bookmark it. Come back to it.
Built to be a reference doc, not a one-time read. Skin vocabulary tables, hair texture taxonomy, cultural settings phrasing, the eight most common failures with the exact phrase that fixes each one, photographer and film references for advanced work, and a one-page cheat sheet at the end you can screenshot and pin.
Editorial-grade design. Built to be used.
Every page was laid out the way a working creator wants to read it — clean tables, scannable failure-and-fix pairings, generous typography. The kind of document you actually keep open in a tab while you work, not one you download once and forget.
Specific in. Specific out.
The whole guide runs on one move: replace vague description with tone + undertone + finish, hair texture + style + technique, setting + cultural prop + reference. Three real examples from inside the document, side by side.
The people who get good results
are the people who know how to talk to the machine.
The training data is improving. The models are getting better. Some of the workarounds in this guide will become unnecessary as the tools learn to render us by default. That's the work. Until then, the creators who get sharper outputs first are the ones who already have the vocabulary.
This is the vocabulary. Twenty-two pages, one read-through to orient yourself, and a cheat sheet at the end you'll come back to every time you open a generator. Twenty-four dollars. Built to outlast the tools it was written for.