- Mar 22, 2019
- 158
- 650
Use World Info. Key(s) is where you put their name, What To Remember is where you put the description. Bear in mind this is best used for what they look like at scene start. Update this after your scene is done, whenever something important changes that would affect a new scene. (haircut, recently proposed instead of dating, no longer a virgin, etc) Avoid details that are irrelevant, like an estranged sibling you never want to actually bring up in the story.
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Use Memory for a summary, it goes at the very top so it doesn't affect the output much. This is like the summary blurb on the back of the book. Good for overall tone, weaker for scene specifics. I highly recommend this for any story longer than one scene.
Use Author's Note in Erebus for genre tags. These are pretty strong and I change these often, even mid-scene. This is inserted right before the last action, so it can be a somewhat useful bludgeon to get the AI to co-operate if you instead use it for scene reminders. It's way easier to just write a guiding sentence that would be shit storytelling for a real book, then delete it once the AI acts on it.
Use World Info for characters or other important things. These go after Memory and before the action history, so your scene can still take precedence. If you are new, just pin everything you want, and try to keep entries short and sweet (150 tokens or less with Max Tokens at 2048), and/or increase your Max Tokens in settings. For new characters, get your AI to describe them mid-scene, then just copy and paste that into the World Info record with their name, maybe adding some character traits like pensive, dramatic, seductive, etc. I try to avoid clothes because then I need to manage the entry if it changes often, but it's good for characters with an outfit they're known for, like maids or soldiers or that one character who always wears shorts.
You need to remember that the AI has a limited memory. If you write that a character wears a bikini to a boardroom meeting, you'd better put it in World Info or womewhat regularly bring it up, or else they'll be wearing something boardroom appropriate later. How soon the AI will forget is based on Max Tokens minus your loaded Memory + Author's Note + World Info. Check your server log for a better idea, it will show you exactly how much history the AI is working with.
For clothing, yeah the AI is as dumb as a brick, but it's often the memory issue. Just delete any lines that don't make sense. You really do need to delete a lot, don't just hit submit again and hope it gets better. Write out your own lines if the AI just isn't going where you want, even half a sentence is good enough most times. We're just not at the level where an AI can write a good book on its own, and this is mean to point out, but if you give it bad inputs it will give you bad outputs.
For positioning, create a world info entry for the room they are in and pin it. Again, keep it short and basic, just saying room type and key furniture. You should try to remove any ambiguity when characters move about. If a character isn't given a position and the scene just started, the AI will probably want to put them somewhere. In the middle of a scene, this tends to not be as important.
Repetition corrupts, leading to more repetition until it gets to a looping state. If you start seeing a pattern in your outputs, break it ASAP, and take a look for where it started to fix that too. This can be as obvious as one line repeating over and over, or as subtle as a conversation turning into "[Name] frowns/smiles/laughs/etc. '[Simple reply]'" repeated over and over with the AI rendered incapable of escaping or writing any variety by the 4th or 5th time it appears. It's my biggest gripe, because most real authors try to avoid structural repetition like that. Your character moving about constantly is likely this issue. By the third time they did it, the AI was thinking "Alright, this is the pattern, I predict it's going to happen again." Even though it reads terribly and doesn't make sense.
