It is the axis on which models differ most and marketing says least. Two models can be equally capable of a beautiful frame while disagreeing completely about whether "holding the bottle in her left hand, label facing camera" is a requirement or a suggestion. For commercial work the second question is the one that costs money.
The hard cases are consistent across the field: counting (three of something, not four), spatial relations (behind, to the left of, on top of), text rendering, negation, and multiple attributes bound to multiple subjects — the red hat on the woman and the blue hat on the man, kept that way round.
Guidance settings raise adherence up to a point and then start distorting the image instead. Beyond that point the honest fix is either a different model or a different approach — reference images and masked edits pin down what a prompt keeps failing to.
In practice
- Test adherence with a brief that has a checkable requirement — a count, a position, a specific colour on a specific object.
- Put the non-negotiable requirement early in the prompt.
- If two attributes keep swapping between subjects, generate them separately and composite.
The mistake to avoid
Judging a model by its best output. Adherence is about the worst of five runs, because that is the one that shows what the model treats as optional.
Where you will run into it
- Text to Image Generator — One prompt. Catalog image models. One studio.
- AI Video Generator — Text-to-video, image-to-video, and story chaining in one studio.
- AI Ad Generator — One offer, several openings, tested the same week.
Related terms
Prompt
Prompt meaning: the written instruction a generative model reads to decide what to make. The one input almost every model needs.
CFG scale
CFG scale meaning: how strictly a model obeys your prompt, trading obedience against the model's sense of a natural image.
Prompt expansion
Prompt expansion is a provider rewrite of your short prompt into a longer one before generation, adding lens, light, texture, and mood you did not write.
Negative prompt
Negative prompt meaning: a list of what you do not want in the output, steering generation away from those terms.
Temporal consistency
Temporal consistency is how well a generated clip keeps things the same from one frame to the next — a shirt that stays the same colour, a background that stays put.
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