Ask ChatGPT for a portrait of "my golden retriever" and you'll get a lovely golden retriever. Just not yours.

That's the whole problem with AI pet portraits. The model knows the breed very well, so a breed name pulls it toward the most typical version. The white chin, the lopsided ear, the patch over one eye: those are what make your dog your dog, and they're exactly what gets averaged away.

Here's how I get past that, with prompts copied from real pages in the ChatGPT dog photo prompts collection on Promptclay .

The photo

Crouch down. A photo from standing height looks down on your dog's head and distorts the face. Get the camera level with the eyes, close enough that the face fills a lot of the frame, in daylight without flash. Take several, because dogs don't hold still, and use the sharpest one.…