Wrangling

Wrangling is the art of having the AI generate content relevant to your interests. Writing Prose that works well is categorically different from writing prose that works well in short stories, books, and other literary media. This page details several tips and techniques to help you direct storytelling AIs adeptly. For now it is a disconcerted jumble of different talking points until someone decides to organize and thoroughly expand on it. At any rate, enjoy this knowledge and keep in mind most of these experiences will have been made with NovelAI. While they are generally universal points your mileage may vary when it comes to specific lorebook advice.

You should also look into general Writing Resources as the easiest and most worth-while improvement you can make is to up your writing with regards to grammar, flow and stylistic means.

Groups/Harems

An anon's guide to good girl management.

Adding a Lore entry for a specific group of characters allows for common features of those characters to be condensed into a single entry.

This Group entry should be activated by cascading with the keys for any of the individual members.

Negative Phrasing

Negation, or the use of negative phrasing, isn't understood well by AI Models. An AI Model would better understand this same statement as: "Negative phrasing confuses AI Models."

As a further example, instead of "MY WAIFU DOES NOT HAVE HAIR," you should write something like "My waifu's bald head shone with every ray of light."

Paragraphs and Pronouns

As basic writing advice, paragraphs should comprise the speech and actions of only one subject character.

Furthermore, pronouns are a veritable pit of potential confusion for the AI. Ensure names get dropped frequently; if you use lorebooks / memory and author's note at all, you should also make a habit of not starting a paragraph with sentences that only utilize a character's pronouns.

As context is built, lorebooks without newlines will generally interject themselves where a story paragraph would be, leading to a potential mis-association between the story as you see it and the generation context as the AI receives and reads it. As an example of this, consider the lorebook for our main protagonist, Hiro, incorrectly superseding a sentence in which our heroine, Jane, is trying to pick-pocket a monk for his money. The faulty snippet of context our AI will thus receive may look something like this (the lorebook will be underlined):

Hiro is the manly super-hero of the story and has a super cool weapon and powers like no other. Hiro has a strong sense of justice. She knew it was wrong, but couldn't keep her hands from advancing towards the monk's exposed wallet.

Fucky to read, right? Incorrectly having more than one subject within a paragraph can also lead to the AI misgendering and misplacing when it comes to differentiating characters, and keeping track of who did what.

Staggered Lore / Specialized Lorebooks

For characters with long backstories, consider separating parts of their Lore into separate entries. Using short Search Ranges and and specific Keys, small details can be added to your context only when they're relevant, and quickly removed from their context when they're not. This lowers the overall context burden of a character's Lorebook by inclusion of only the most pertinent details at any given time.

Teaching the AI New Tricks

Some concepts are easy for the AI to understand, where it is trained on enough of it to be expected to get it. Other things, like weird biology and whatever else I know you're trying to peddle to the AI, may be less so. But don't worry, it can learn how something it doesn't understand is supposed to work out, you just have to be a good wrangler. I'll use a harpy (girlfriend edition) as an example.

The TL;DR of below: Keep hammering it in, don't get lazy and let bad shit slip, and talk about the effects of it

Confidence and Correction

The AI doesn't understand something, so you need to be the one who introduces it, pushes it into the story until it sticks, and corrects issues as they come up until they don't. Or at least, do less, because the AI is a casino. So write about your harpy girlfriend how you imagine harpies to exist in your setting. Keep the writing focus on it for a bit, and don't worry: weird concepts introduced usually justify their focus. Just keep fixing problems as the AI makes them, and confidently writing as examples of how the AI should treat the harpy. The more help it has in context, the less mistakes it will make.

What It Means Over What It Is

Obviously, you need to describe a harpy's appearance if it appears, because this is a medium where you want to spark the imagination of the reader, right? But after a solid description of the harpy, shift the focus to how the unique biology affects her. It's worth showing the harpy struggling to use claws to use a phone, or complain about lack of shoes, whatever needs to happen. All of the EFFECTS of being a harpy is the actual juice of what the AI needs to know, the appearance may become more consistent with repeated descriptions but the AI will still not understand how it matters unless you're the one putting how it matters into context.

Logical Reasoning

Apparently, logical reasoning on AI Language Models can be promoted with specific phrases.

Let's think step by step

may be a particularly powerful author's note to increase reasoning ability in outputs.