Eggs
Have you seen my egg?
It isn’t just any egg. It’s sitting in the caldera of a volcano. Maybe it represents the precarity of life?
It took me several hours to coax StableDiffusion 1.5 (SD1.5) to lay this particular egg in January 2023. It totally failed at simple attempts like “egg sitting in the caldera of a volcano”, so instead I started by using the AND keyword to produce the intersection of two prompts:1
an egg in a cup
an egg in a caldera
But a simple AND of these prompts wasn’t enough to get the result I wanted. Instead, I’d invariably be given some magmatic variant of your boring old egg-in-a-cup.
I suppose this was because the joint egg+cup was much stronger than in SD1.5’s training set than egg+caldera.
To sneak past that, I weighted the egg-in-a-cup prompt more highly for the first 2-4 denoising steps, then quickly turned up the weight on egg-in-a-caldera. The idea was to get the model to put the egg into a noisy proto-cup, thereby locking in the correct overall cup-like composition, but then while the cup’s form was still ambiguous, turn up egg-in-a-caldera.
Here are are two results from during that tuning process. The one on the left is fully egg-in-cup. The one on the right is somewhere in between, the weights being switched too late, and the cup too well established already to be diffused into a volcano.
Here are a few other eggs-in-caldera that I generated with SD1.5 from different seeds.
See how weird they are?
Eggs and egg-shaped portals have become my preferred objects to prompt for, when evaluating the aesthetics of image models. In the process I think I’ve become something of an eggspert on what makes a good egg, as well as what to eggspect from each model.
In the neggst section I’ll show results from some other models. None of them allow advanced parametrization like AND, or weight adjustments over denoising steps, or most of the other fancy things we can do when working with local models like StableDiffusion. But why not?
For one, the frontier labs haven’t been much for giving that level of parametric control over their cloud models in any case. And as models have gotten better at thinking and composition, the eggspectation is that you should be able to simply describe what you want prosaically, and the model will figure everything out for you.
While compositionality and prompt understanding have both improved, I agree with others that the results have lately become less iconic or weird, and more like quality, all-purpose trough fodder. But the purpose of this post not to talk about model collapse or regression to the mean or whatever you think is the cause of ensloppification. This post is eggs.
If this were a rigorous eggsperiment, I would have done some things differently, such as giving a standard set of prompts to each model in turn, for a fairer set of comparisons. But this was not rigorous. This was eggs.
Now some Midjourney v6 from February 2024.
Ostentatious:
Eggsample prompt (bottom left): cosmic egg, pristine yolk, divine whites, smooth shell, sunburst, bicolor, woodcut bliss --no frame
Ethereal:
Eggsample prompt (right): psychedelic portal, smooth and pristine egg in its natural habitat --no cracked, border, rough
Stark? Lines?:
Eggsample prompt (top right): doodle linotype, psychedelic portal, smooth and pristine egg in its natural habitat --no cracked, border, rough
Embirded:
Eggsample prompt (top left): masterful precise illustration, unnaturally smooth egg, mystical experience involving a bird’s unhatched progeny --no smudge --weird 100
DI’:
Prompt: psychedelic color intaglio, salvador dali, smooth and pristine egg in its natural habitat --no cracked, border, rough shell, reflective
Midjourney v6 generated decently interesting images with little prompting effort, so my strategy was a bit different than with SD1.5: generate a bunch of images and choose my favourites. This felt less like “making art” than caldera-egg did.
I was pleased with the variability in its responses, but likewise, it had some issues with the consistency of details. For eggsample:
Prompt: masterful precise illustration, unnaturally smooth psychedelic egg, mystical experience involving a bird’s unhatched progeny --no sane
Kind of a mess, though reasonably symmetric compared to what SD1.5 would have done with something this intricate.
Now DALL-E 3. March 2025.
Eggsample prompt (top left): minimalist egg containing a psychedelic portal, resting snugly in the caldera of a single volcano as if it were an egg cup, in a psychedelic ukiyo-e landscape
Still low prompt effort, and the results were getting smoother and still more coherent in the details. I remember being frustrated that I was limited to prosaic prompts, but couldn’t coax it to rest the egg inside the caldera.
GPT-Image-1 on the first of August, 2025.
Prompt: in the Orion Nebula, a brilliant egg shaped portal, through which is visible a barren stratovolcano under a clear blue sky, with a white egg sitting half-inside its caldera, as though in a cup
This is the first time I was able to get a model to one-shot this composition, though I think the result is still less iconic than the SD1.5 caldera egg.
And of course it still makes mistakes, such as its attempt at the netivot in this kabbalistic tree of egg:
Prompt: in the Orion Nebula, a brilliant egg shaped portal, through which is visible a kabbalistic tree of life against a clear blue sky, where each of the 10 sefirot (11 nodes) is a pristine egg
But the best GPT-Image-1 egg is probably this one:
Prompt: A photo of a luminescent egg-shaped portal, through the sheen of which is imminently visible a vibrant fractal dimension; the portal is floating low above a dark, calm, and florid ukiyo-e landscape
Finally, here’s Nano Banana 2 in April 2026:
Prompt: a print of an egg resting in the caldera of a stratovolcano, as though it were an egg cup
Absolute slop. Big oeuf.
I still prefer the original caldera egg. I had to be thoughtful to create it, and it’s iconically simple. So I decided to make it my avatar recently.
I haven’t tried the newest local models (such as Flux) to see how they compare to SD1.5. If I get a chance, I’ll mess with one for a couple of hours before I post some BONUS EGGS that did not make it into this post. Coming to a day near soon!
Fin.
Egg.
(GPT-Image-1) Prompt: generate an image of an egg person in a serious egg play and they are become kind of eggy because they have forgotten one of their eggs (the image does not contain multiple actual eggs)
I don’t have the original SD1.5 prompts with me here at Inkhaven, but I am confident in my eggsplanation of the broad strokes of my prompting strategy.