Directing the Narrative

By placebomancer

This guide will teach you how to direct the AI to describe characters, items, locations, and even actions and events. Additionally, you will learn how to direct the AI to stylize the descriptions it generates.

Describing People/Places/Things
Describing people, places, and things is relatively easy. To describe a farm, you might write a direction like:

Note that you can add a newline to the example above so that the description is written on the line beneath the direction. I'll be doing that for the remaining examples.

It sometimes helps to begin the description yourself with the subject:

The AI completes the description with:

Now delete the direction line, leaving only the generated description:

If you leave the direction in the story, the AI will start generating directions—and you don't want that, do you?

Describing Actions
Actions are a bit trickier. Sometimes, the AI will mistakenly treat the direction as an event that already happened. The best results are obtained from writing the direction in the present tense, like so:

Sometimes, a  direction works better:

One method will often perform better than the other, but either approach may require retries. Again, it can help to start the description for the AI if it's having difficulties:

Allowing the AI to complete the text produced:

Remember to delete the direction!

Author Directions
One way to impart style to a direction is to use an author the AI is familiar with:

The author doesn't actually have to be in the fine-tune, as long as the AI is familiar with their style.

It may be helpful to add a comma for clarity to more complex directions:

Sometimes style can be confusing to the AI:

It may help to use a comma and specify that we are interested in Fitzgerald's writing style rather than his manner of drinking:

This direction produced the text:

Style Directions
What if we don't want to use a specific author, but we know the sort of writing style we want to generate? We can use style directions:

All the same tips apply from Author Directions. Use commas and clarify style when it might confuse the AI. For instance:

Is the description elegant or is Anna dressed in an elegant fashion? It's best to clarify:

This direction produced the text:

Very Style, Much Wow
We can also use words like very or extremely before the style to great effect:

The results can be surprising and sometimes rather comical, so I'd recommend experimenting before throwing very on every style.

Put the Style Last
The above examples might seem rather wordy. There is a reason:

The last word in the direction has the strongest influence on the description.

For example:

This direction is less effective at imparting terseness because the influence of style overpowers it. Compare:

I tested a large number of direction variations and the one factor that granted the style the strongest influence on the generated description was putting the style last.

Everything is Effective
Every word/token in the direction has some effect on the generated description. The effect may not always be especially apparent, but it's there. As already mentioned, words near the end of the direction usually have more effect on the description. The examples provided so far attempt to maximize the impact of a single chosen style on the generation while ensuring the AI is reasonably confident in what we're asking for. But everything involves trade-offs, and there are other variations that may produce output you prefer, even if the chosen style isn't imparting its maximum effect on the description.

Punctuation
As already mentioned, commas in your direction can help clarify your intent to the AI—but they also increase the probability of commas showing up in your description. Yes, even the punctuation in a direction stylistically affects the description. The same is true of em dashes (—), which also work if you're as fond of them as I am.

The Elements of Style
Every word added to a description provides an additional effect, whether desired or not. As mentioned earlier, it is sometimes helpful to specify writing style for clarity. However, this has an effect that competes somewhat with the chosen style. You might not mind this effect. Adding words like author or writer can provide a more literary description:

Feel free to mix it up and add additional words to the direction, noting that each word competes with or reinforces the others.

Describe vs Description Of
works as well as  directions for people, places, and things. The only reason it isn't mentioned earlier in this guide is because it's not nearly as effective for actions. Of course, like anything, choosing one over the other imparts some stylistic effects. For example,  makes the description of a character more likely to begin with a pronoun than a name. Broadly speaking, descriptions generated with  are a bit more terse and those generated with   are a bit more wordy.

Quotes for Adherence
Directions with a starting double quote adhere more closely to the given instructions than those without an opening quote:

However, quotes have some drawbacks:
 * Quotes work particularly well with Krake and Sigurd, but Euterpe tends towards shorter output with an opening quote
 * The AI may assume the quote represents the start of dialog, rather than the start of a description
 * If an author is specified, the generated description is more likely to be in the author's preferred tense and POV
 * Any dialog generated inside the quotes is likely to use single quotes, which you may have to change to double quotes (unless you're from the UK)
 * You have to remove the opening and closing quotes after generation

Despite these problems, the effect really is noticably stronger with Krake and Sigurd and the improved quality is often worth the effort of rewriting the description into your preferred tense.

Here are some tips to avoid the AI interpreting the opening quote as dialog:
 * Always prefer  over
 * Use words like author, writing, and style in the direction to give the AI hints about what we expect:  (it needn't be this elaborate)

While I haven't tested it thoroughly, you may try substituting a starting single quote for a double quote as well. When dialog is generated inside a single quote, the AI will usually generate it with double quotes. However, this Britishism likely has some stylistic effect on the generated descriptions.

Discovering New Styles
So you can impart stylistic effects on the descriptions the AI generates, but what if you're not sure what styles to try? Here are some ways to mine the AI for ideas. Not all of the styles you discover will work well, of course, but you can't try out new things until you have a list of things to try!

Additionally, this process must be done separately for each model: just because Krake understands a word one way doesn't mean Euterpe has an identical understanding of the word.

All of these methods involve looking at token probabilities. If you want to see more than just the top 10 tokens, ban the ones that have already been generated and retry to get 10 more.

Synonyms:

or

Antonyms:

Definitions:

Authors:

Finding authors:

(note that this one is very biased towards popular authors, to the point that the top tokens may not be accurate at all—once you have a list of authors, test them against the Authors prompt above this one)

Lists:

(each generated item biases the list, which is fine if you're looking for a generally broad set of related concepts)

These are not exhaustive, by any means; many, many variations are possible. Be aware that not every style you discover will work well; they always need to be tested against prompts like. And one style might seem to work terribly when it actually works great and you just had five unlucky generations in a row—and vice versa. But you will undoubtedly discover some really interesting effects doing this, and broaden your vocabulary while you're at it!

Prose for Pros
Can't you just find styles using [INSERT FORMAT HERE]?

Well … kinda? Feel free to experiment, but the ones I've tested don't compare well with simple prose for this task. Try it out for yourself:

or

Try whatever variations you like: Style vs Writing Style, lowercase attributes, &c. Then compare the likely tokens to. Prose provides results closer to the sort of styles we're looking for and the styles generated by prose seem more applicable to Ernest Hemingway.