Tags

Link to the original rentry: https://rentry.org/story-params Tags, A/N Tags, or Story Parameters refer to the concept of recreating the tagging system used for the NovelAI dataset within your own stories in order to guide their AIs with minimal effort. Placed at the beginning of your story or within Memory (to therefore be placed at the top of context at all times), Story Parameters often demonstrate a strong influence in the direction of your story, style, and genre. The effect isn't consistent or as strong as a Module, but can present a convenient alternative when you're a lazy fuck who doesn't want to go through the trouble of training a module while being too good to just write.

The Format
As of now, the standard format for a Tag is: [ Author: X; Tags: x, y, c...; Genre: X ] Every specific space, capitalization and punctuation is imperative for the tag to work well, so follow this formatting pattern. There exist some confirmed variations, including: [ Genre: X ]

[ Tags: x, y, c... ]

[ Author: ] Placing these bracketed words at the start of context will generate relatively coherent stories on the fly of any random genre from Fantasy to hardcore Erotica. But this auto-generation of eloquent, brand-new stories can go even deeper! By adding information to these blank Author/Tags/Genre spaces, you can specify the AI to generate—theoretically—any kind of story of your choosing!

Author
The Author section of the story parameters is pretty cut and dry. With all the novels put into Sigurd's training, there are many prolific and highly stylized authors that you can direct the AI to draw inspiration from. If you know literature at all, then certain author choices will make a lot of sense. George R.R. Martin, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and J. R. R. Tolkien are all fine choices for the author spot, especially if the story you want to make befits what they'd usually write.

Do note that putting in an author can greatly affect the eloquence and style of your story, so much so that you might inherit story aspects from an author that you may or may not like. For instance, suddenly seeing Tyrian Lannister if you use George R.R. Martin or a hobbit with Tolkien.

There are also quite a handful of Erotica authors in NAI's finetune data, so don't feel discouraged, coomers. Some of the more notable writers for cooms are Sylvia Day, Anna Lores, and Maya Banks, but there are surely many more.

(Edit: A list of NSFW authors was discovered on the NAI discord. There are still likely more, but these should be effective for cooming purposes. I'd recommend researching the author of your choice before plugging it in to your story parameter. This is to avoid using an author that may only specialize in writing a specific kind of smut, which may negatively influence a story's direction if the fetishes clash. [ Authors: J.R. Ward, Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Marissa Meyer, Robin Hobb, Diana Gabaldon, Nalini Singh, Kresley Cole, Charlaine Harris, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Christine Feehan, Ilona Andrews, Elizabeth Hunter, Lisa McMann, Carrie Ryan, Rachel Caine, Laurell K Hamilton, Maggie Shayne, Patricia Briggs] At the end of the day, simply searching for "popular erotica author" or something more specific like "popular mystery author" will usually give some idea on what author might be the best pick to drive your story and give it a certain style.

A general rule of thumb proposed by NAI's fine-tune team is that any Western author with 10 or more popular novels will typically be useable for story parameters. However, for the more obscure authors who may not meet that requirement, there is an explicit way to determine whether the author of your choice is present in Sigurd's fine-tune data.

All it requires is putting in the author of your choice like so: [ Author: (Your Author); Tags:

Make sure the Ban Bracket Generation option is greyed out when doing this. Note the open bracket in the first example. With this, you would put in your author's name and let the AI generate what tags match with said author. If you were to put Tolkien, tags like hobbit and adventure would generate, confirming that author's place in Sigurd's data because of its accuracy. '''BUT BE AWARE. The AI will not reject fake authors or authors not included in its training data. As show in the example below, even FAKE authors will generate tags.''' To truly confirm whether your author of choice is included, you must cross-reference the Tags the AI generates and judge whether that fits what that author would actually write.

Tags
Tags have the most varied use and freedom out of the big three, and will be the longest section of this part of the guide.

So, let's say you wanted to add the Tag 'dragon' to your story parameter. The AI sees Tags as a gentle nudge in a certain direction rather than a harsh push. So, if we were to use 'dragon' as a Tag, there is only a chance that dragons will be mentioned at the beginning of your auto-generated story, and if dragons are brought up—whether it be by you or by the AI—the story will usually end up describing that dragon with greater focus and detail than without said Tag.

This is where it becomes important to make it clear that while your custom story parameter can help the AI write a story completely on its own with little hand-holding, giving your story even just a sentence or two of guidance—especially in the beginning—can do wonders for the AI and make it give you what you want.

A little guidance can go such a long way, mainly because of how flexible Tags are. While some Tags are definitely easier for the AI to understand than others, tags can virtually be anything. Do you want your story parameters to give you an output that starts you off with a dog companion? Just make one of the tags literally 'dog-companion' and watch the AI spin you a tale about you fighting evil with your domesticated dire wolf. With no use of memory! And for the coomers, Tags are pretty much just the fetish zone and can accommodate a wide arrange of sexual terms as long as they are straightforward. The AI will be able to latch onto certain NSFW-tier Tags easier than most and require little guidance—mainly Tags and terms you'd see in your average Literotica, like 'sub/dom' and 'lesbianism'. The more exotic and unusual you make your Tags, the more guidance you'll likely have to give the AI as it auto-generates your story. With that being said, the average NAI user would likely be surprised just how well Sigurd can understand certain Tags, so feel free to experiment!

Alien Sex Example
In this story parameter, I added the Tags 'alien', 'alien sex', and 'brothel'—Tags that the AI seemingly wouldn't be able to handle at first glance. In my test, it handled the concept of a 'brothel' Tag just fine, but I could tell it was going to need a little push to bring up any aliens. So, I provided a simple sentence to help set up the concept, and with every reroll of the output, the AI would finish my sentence of guidance with my character showing interest in fucking aliens. This means that—while the AI would struggle to bring up such an odd thing on its own—the tag being present in the story parameter does make a difference and does affect how the AI focuses on the word of your choice. Remember, this was done with NO Memory or AN. To prove that this wasn't placebo or a mad stroke of luck, I copied and pasted what the AI had made so far—including my sentence of guidance—but this time removed the 'alien' and 'alien sex' Tags from the story parameters. Again, NO Memory or AN. In my fifteen rerolls of the output, it did not mention aliens once, and the AI simply filled in the dots on what would be the most appropriate answer for the specified Sci-Fi genre—which tended to be robots. The way you write a Tag can also make quite the difference in how the AI understands it. To give in an amusing example, let's take the phrase 'bbw' (Big Busty Women). When it is specifically used as a Tag, Sigurd is utterly incapable of understanding this acronym when it is lowercase. However, the AI CAN understand 'BBW' and would incorporate the Tag into the story when expected to, showing that capitalization can make a ton of difference when it comes to the effectiveness of your Tags.

Acronyms appear to be the touchiest by far when it comes to this capitalization rule, and making them lowercase will almost always cause them to be ignored by the AI. Other Tags—like shown in my previous examples—can be recognized when lowercase and have no need to be capitalized. All in all, it's just a matter of testing what works.

More on that, if you're experimenting with a unique Tag with two words like 'first person', the AI may read 'first person' and 'first-person' (note the added hyphen) differently. So if you feel that the AI may ever be ignoring one of your Tags, try rewriting it a couple of times and see if that could possibly be the issue.

All of these examples apply to NSFW and SFW interests.

Genre
Genres, much like with Authors, are very dry with little need for explanation. The strongest power of specifying a Genre in your story parameter is that it guides the AI on what kind of person/objects/things or even mood would be the most appropriate to show up in your story. Making 'Fantasy' the Genre would naturally make strange names and magical concepts more likely to show up without any prompting from you, without any use of memory, etc. Then there would be adding Horror to the Genre space, which would direct the story to have more gritty, foreboding situations and descriptions to appear. Do note that the guiding sentence I provided for the Horror Genre example was the same for the Fantasy Genre example. This was to show just how much Genre can change what direction the AI will consider appropriate as it generates your outputs.

If you ever run out of ideas, much like with authors, you can always search up a list of Genres to use for your story parameters. The Genre space can be quite customizable but does not share the creative freedom of Tags and—for most situations—you won't be able to stuff just any word into Genre space.

Also, for coomers, the most tested Genre for NSFW has been 'Literotica'. I've also had had success with using 'Romance' as the Genre if I wanted the story to eventually take on more sexual matters with little direction.