Stubborn
nerfed
paranoid

AI-enabled image generators promise magical, unrestricted imagination. Yet, in practice, users find themselves in an image-making process that feels clunky, guided, opaque, and moderated.

Within prompting communities, users share these experiences. They report moments of friction, compare interpretations, and develop strategies to work around the model’s hidden rules.

We collected and analysed 118 posts from the subreddit ↘ r/GeminiAI to observe how this community of image-makers makes sense of the model’s behaviour, and how it reacts to the friction it encounters. The result is two visualisations:

Sense-making

The ways r/GeminiAI contributors interpret the model’s refusals and malfunctions.

Reacting

The strategies r/GeminiAI contributors adopt to overcome undesired behaviours.