Why AI poems are usually bad and how this prompt fixes it
The average AI poem is a waterfall of clichés — hearts of gold, eyes like stars, light in the darkness. They're technically poems but emotionally hollow because they could have been written about anyone. The 'one real specific detail' instruction is the whole fix. A poem about your grandmother that mentions the specific thing she always said when you left her house, or the exact chair she sat in every morning, or the song she hummed while cooking — that poem lands because it could only have been written about her. The AI builds the structure; your specific detail makes it real.
The 'no clichés' instruction
Telling the AI to avoid clichés is one of the most effective prompt instructions that exists. It forces the model away from its statistical defaults — the phrases that appear most often in poems it was trained on — and toward more original language. The result is never perfect poetry, but it's almost always more interesting and more personal than what you'd get without that constraint.