How to Write Cyberpunk Image Prompts - Nano Banana 2

Getting past that means either committing to the cliche deliberately or picking a different strand of the genre and describing it properly.

The neon-noir street is only one of them. There is corporate cyberpunk — clean glass towers, cold white light, sterile lobbies, quiet menace — which is arguably closer to the original novels than the street version. There is lo-fi cyberpunk: cramped apartments, CRT monitors, tangled cables, beige plastic hardware, 1980s ideas about the future. There is biopunk, all wet organic technology and surgical light. There is the sun-bleached desert variety with dust and improvised prosthetics rather than rain and neon.

Cyberpunk prompts usually fail on the technology, because “futuristic cybernetic augmentation” means nothing specific and the model fills it with generic glowing panels. Say what the thing actually is: a mechanical arm with exposed hydraulics and visible wear, a port at the base of the skull, a cracked screen taped to a forearm, an ID chip scar.

Wear and repair are the details that make it feel lived in. The genre is about decay and improvisation, not about polish. Duct tape, mismatched parts, corroded contacts, a screen with dead pixels. These do more work than any amount of glow.