TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · The Brief · AGE 18—20 · POSITIONAL · METHOD
Briefing a grounded generator
A preserve instruction only asks, and the mask is what holds the wall.
When to use
When you have a real input worth protecting — a drawn section, a plan, a site photograph, a page of text — and you want the model to edit, label, lay out or present it rather than invent past it. This is the grounded register.
The method
Start with what must not change: "preserve the geometry of the attached section; do not move walls, levels or openings." Then say what to add: labels, callouts, a title block, a layout. Then name the visual register as a drawing convention. Then the output format: size, proportion, file type. Last, state the instruction the whole brief exists for: "do not paraphrase any of the text" or "do not change the protected elements." Then reach for the control that enforces it: where the tool offers a mask, a locked region or a conditioning input — the drawing itself as a line or depth image — use it. A sentence such as "do not move walls" asks; the mask is what holds the wall. Run it. Check the protected elements first, before you look at anything the model added.
Watch for this
Trusting the sentence. A preserve instruction is not a geometric constraint: a written instruction asks; the system's own controls enforce. And reading the output for what was added while missing what was changed. A grounded generator can redraw a wall half a metre over while adding a beautiful label to it. Check the fixed things against the input, element by element.
The Lab's note
You are not writing a prompt to produce the text. You are writing the text, then writing a prompt to protect it. That is our order of work for grounded tools: the real input comes first, the brief names what is guarded, and the tool's controls and your check do the guarding. Others use the same tools to generate from scratch, and that is legitimate. Our position is that the grounded register is most useful when it protects work that already exists.
Try it
Write a grounded brief for one of your own drawings naming three things that must not change, two things to label, and the output format. Run it once with the preserve instruction alone and once with the instruction backed by a mask or a conditioning input. Overlay input and output for both and find every drift.
Prove it
Show a case where a preserve instruction, backed by a mask or conditioning input, kept a real drawing from being redrawn: the input, the brief, the control you used, the output, and the overlay.
How it works
Grounded generators — image-reasoning models and conditioned diffusion — are built to follow instructions. They hold references, text, layout and constraints better than dreaming engines, and they surprise you less. Conditioning methods such as ControlNet let a supplied drawing steer the geometry directly; masks lock regions out of the edit. Those are the controls. The brief names what they protect, and the overlay check confirms that they did. None of this makes preservation automatic.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
- Nothing yet names this as a foundation.
Sources
- curriculum-spine
- dreaming-curation-grounded-trio
- Five Plates That Hold
- Dreaming Engines and Grounded Generators
- Zhang et al., Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models (ControlNet)
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.