The slang cheat sheet

The AI art slang and terms cheat sheet (2025 edition), with extra Midjourney spice. Because half the community speaks in parameters and the other half in pure chaos.

LoRA. Tiny style model you train on 20 to 50 images. The reason everyone suddenly has their own signature look.

Flux. The open-source king right now. Hands, text, coherence. It's embarrassing closed models.

CFG Scale. How tightly the model follows your prompt. Low means wild creativity, high means literal robot.

Negative Prompt. Your "don't you dare" list: blurry, deformed, extra fingers, watermark, text.

Inpainting. Mask a spot and rewrite only that part. Your digital eraser plus magic wand.

Outpainting. Expand beyond the borders.

Hires Fix. Second pass upscale plus denoising. Turns potato into 8K glory.

Steps. Refinement rounds. 20 to 30 fast, 50 plus cinematic.

Denoising Strength. In img2img: how much change you allow. 0.6 to 0.8 is the gold zone.

Slop. Lazy, soulless, mass-produced junk. We've all made it. Just don't post it.

Burn. Crank stylize or CFG too high and you get a psychedelic meltdown.

--chaos. Midjourney parameter (0 to 100). Higher means more wild, unusual compositions and variations.

--weird. Midjourney's secret sauce (0 to 3000). Injects bizarre, surreal, experimental vibes. The higher, the stranger.

--sref. Style Reference. Feed it an image URL and MJ copies the exact aesthetic (colors, composition, mood). The new king of consistency.

--stylize / --s. How much Midjourney's artistic training influences the result. Low means literal, high means beautiful but sometimes ignores you.

--niji. Midjourney's anime and manga model. --niji 6 is the latest: cleaner lines, better faces, full-on anime energy.

--tile. Makes seamless repeating patterns. Perfect for wallpapers, fabrics, textures.

--v. Midjourney version. --v 6.1 was current then: better coherence, hands, text than ever.

--ar. Aspect ratio. --ar 16:9 cinematic, --ar 9:16 vertical, --ar 1:1 square.

--q. Quality. --q 2 means higher detail but slower and more expensive.

Turbo. Fast mode in Flux or MJ. Speed over perfection.

Relax Mode. Midjourney's chill queue. Slow but free or cheap.

Stealth Mode. Hides your gens from the public gallery.

Raw Mode. --raw means less Midjourney beauty filter, more literal to your prompt.

Personalization (--p). Train MJ on your own style with 100 to 200 rated images. Then --p makes everything feel like you.

Vary Region. Inpainting on steroids. Select areas and regenerate with new prompts.

Remix. Take someone else's gen, tweak the prompt, keep the vibe.

Quality Boosters. Those lazy magic words: masterpiece, highly detailed, best quality, 8k. They still work stupidly well.

Next time you see "--chaos 80 --weird 1500 --sref [url]" you'll know exactly what kind of beautiful madness is coming.