Your negative prompts are probably making your videos worse
Long lists of things you do not want are the most common wasted effort in AI video prompting. Here is what to write instead.
Open almost any shared AI video prompt and you will find a trailing paragraph of things the creator does not want: no distortion, no extra fingers, no watermark, no blur, no artefacts, no text. It reads like diligence. In practice most of it is doing nothing, and some of it is actively hurting the shot.
Naming a symptom is not the same as preventing it
"No extra fingers" does not stop extra fingers. Hands are difficult because hands are difficult, and adding the word "fingers" to your prompt mostly succeeds in making hands more salient in the frame. The reliable fix is compositional: keep hands out of close range, give them something to hold, or crop the shot.
The same applies to most of the standard list. Distortion, artefacts and blur are outputs of how hard you are pushing the model, not settings you can decline.
Every exclusion competes with your actual instruction
A prompt is a finite amount of attention. Twelve lines of exclusions sit alongside your description, and the model has to weigh all of it. In the library, the prompts that produce the most predictable results tend to have short exclusion lists and long, specific descriptions. The ones that read as a wall of "no" tend to produce vaguer output, because the positive intent got crowded out.
Describe the presence, not the absence
The strongest replacement for an exclusion is a positive statement of what should be there instead. Rather than "no cluttered background", write what the background is: a plain concrete wall, an empty corridor, open sky. Rather than "no fast cuts", state the shot count and duration. You are giving the model something to do rather than something to avoid.
What negatives are genuinely good for
There is a narrow band where they earn their place: excluding a specific thing the model keeps volunteering that is not implied by your description. If every generation of your street scene adds a red car and you do not want a red car, "no vehicles" is a legitimate instruction, because that is a specific unwanted addition rather than a general quality complaint.
The test is simple. If you can imagine the model deliberately adding the thing, exclude it. If the thing is a defect rather than a decision, no words will help.
Try this
Take a prompt you use often and delete the entire exclusion block. Generate it. In most cases the output will be indistinguishable, and you will have learned that those twelve lines were costing you attention you could have spent on the shot. Then add back only the one or two exclusions that address something the model actually keeps volunteering.
Drawn from patterns across the Unhindered AI video prompts library.