Playing AI Dungeon
Common Questions
What is the Author’s Note?
The AI can only process about 1000 words worth of text at a time, but a story quickly becomes much larger than that, which means the AI will only be given the last few pages of your adventure: it doesn’t have access to anything written before that. To compensate, the interface adds some extra text: the Author’s Note is placed a few sentences before the end of what is sent, while Memory and World Info are added to the beginning.
Along with these other fields, the Author’s Note is a tool to add information that isn’t in those last few pages, and is generally used to give the AI details about:
- The Genre(s) of the story
- The preferred Writing Style
- The General Plot of what’s going on
Or any other details that are very important for the AI to have right this moment.
Unlike the other two, the Authors Note has special formatting applied: it will prepend whatever you put in it with “Author’s Note: ” and surround it in square brackets (‘[‘ and ‘]’). In the stories which the AI was trained on, this was a common way for Authors to describe something about their story, so the AI will usually interpret the square brackets (and the term “Author’s Note”) as being descriptive of what should come next, as opposed to actual story text.
This makes the Author’s Note very different from Memory, World Info, or any other text, as it is out-of-character and can be much more technical. For example, you can say something like, “This is a [genre] story about [plot].” or “The rest of this story is [style].” and that will be appropriate.
Fun Fact: This effect can also be achieved by just typing in “[Author’s Note: ]” with some text anywhere else the AI is going to be given.
How to use the Author’s Note
The Author's Note can be found in the Right Sidebar, under the “Story” tab, in the Prompt Settings. Simply enter the text in this box, and the interface will automatically save it and use it for your next action.
The Author's Note can be up to 300 characters long (not including the brackets or the “Author’s Note: ” part) though an acceptable entry could be well below that. Remember that the Author's Note will take up some space in the limited amount of text which would otherwise be given to the AI from the story.
Note that filling this in is entirely optional, even more so than Memory. If you leave it blank, the interface will NOT add the brackets or "Author's Note: " without text: they only appear if you type something in there. If you can’t think of anything good to put in here, just leaving it blank might be better.
Tips for using the Author’s Note
- Keep Author’s Notes as dense and concise as possible, fitting as many relevant details as you can in as little space as you can. Don’t even worry about writing style, as the AI will see this as being independent from story text. Some people just fill this with comma-separated keywords.
- Be detailed. Don’t just say “Fantasy story”, say what kind of fantasy story, give expressive words. For example...
- “Dark-Fantasy Horror story about a world corrupted by magic. Rated T for violence.”
- “This is a Hard Science-Fiction story where I delve into humanity’s fear of Artificial Intelligence.”
- “High Fantasy set in a world of talking equines and other fantasy creatures! Tags: Noblebright, Magical, Fantastical, Fun”
- You can also use this to recap highly relevant details, like the names of immediate participants in a conversation, or your current goal / quest, or where you’re at, like you would with Memory. Remember: there are no rules when it comes to controlling the AI.
- If you don’t think it’s working where it is, remember that you can always cause the same effect by surrounding a statement in square-brackets. You can do this in the Memory, a World Info entry, or even in an action itself, to try and describe your story. You don’t even have to label it “Author’s Note: “, because typing things like “Note: “, “Tags: “, or even just using the square brackets alone will be treated as being out-of-context when the AI is processing them.
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