A question about the current situation with AI Character Chat (and other text generators)
I never thought I'd write here, but I wanted to comment on the recent changes. I've been using "ai-character-chat" for over a year and have gotten used to a lot. Yes, sometimes everything becomes slow. Yes, sometimes the AI can't follow the prompts properly and "loses" part of what it was supposed to write. Yes, it loves silly descriptions of appearance (constantly writes about someone's "Adam's apple," for example), it loves to get fixated on something and use it in several posts in a row at the end of each post (in one chat, for example, I had 10+ posts endings about "grandfather clocks" that would sink, explode, burn, and melt). Yes, sometimes the AI would lapse into overly colorful descriptions, almost like purple prose. But all of that was better than what happened to it now.
I won't speculate on what's causing this—a bug or a model change—because I obviously don't have all the information. But as a user of this site for a year now, I want to comment (I think everyone has the right to as long as they do it in polite way). In its current state, the text model is completely unusable. Where once was imagination, a varied style, interesting ideas and text, now there's a dry, robotic thing.
The language became completely mechanical. Previously, when you generated a character from a picture, you'd get a text description that was emotional, sometimes with jokes, sometimes with irony. Now, every description is a collection of dry facts, presented in short sentences like, "This is John. He likes A. He dislikes B. He speaks this way. He walks this way. His goal is C. His fear is D." The AI can no longer write in different styles depending on the character, almost doesn't use italics or bolds anymore (yes, AI used to be too fond of this, but it was often appropriate).
It's logical that, due to the lack of communication with the developer, people are starting to panic, get angry, and come up with assumptions that often don't correspond to reality. But what are we, the users, left to do? No one really understands what's going on, just as they didn't understand when the image generation changed a few months ago.
I'll speak for myself: I've been using the site for a little over a year, and it's the best site of its kind I've encountered online, and it met all my requirements. I didn't complain when the image generation changes happened a few months ago. I agreed that we needed to give it some time and maybe things would improve. But what happened now it's much worse.
For example, I had about 20 characters, and they're all essentially dead—this bug (or new model, or whatever it is) has turned them all into robots with the same very, very poor style. I understand that running a project like this site can be difficult, as can maintaining constant communication with users, but without communication and understanding what's going on, panic (or even anger) of users are inevitable.
So, if this is a bug and it will be fixed soon, please let us know, at least just in form of "yes" or "no". If this was an intentional change, I join all those asking for it to be rolled back. It's made everything much worse, and text generation is now simply pointless. It's impossible to work with. And this site has no better alternatives. Not a single one. I hope this problem will be resolved soon. With all due respect.
I'd have to completely disagree. The new model has been a joy to work with so far.
I understand you might be a bit distraught over this, but think about why the AI turned 'robotic': because people were sick of the constant flowery, overly verbose, filler descriptions of useless or even useful items.
I'm very glad about these changes, but I do think a post should've been made just to alert everyone. A rollback I believe is impossible, since dev probably spent months on this and is definitely not gonna abandon it now.
Arther says hi.
Ah yes. I still remember the good ol' days of Elena Castellanos.
I think it's normal for some to like the current state. The problem is, we still don't know whether this is a result of a bug or a deliberate change to the model. I've seen opinions on both sides.
As for the text, I'll try to give an example of why the current state looks terrible to me.
I opened a saved old scenario to check and asked the chat to regenerate one of the old posts.
The prompt, without going into details, was a group of people discussing a specific topic on a forum. The prompt was short and simply contained a few words about what the characters were saying.
Old version: based on just a few words from the prompt, a long, lively, colorful description was generated, with several previously non-existent characters speaking in different styles, clever use of italics and bold text, and it all looked like a real forum talking.
New regenerated version: a long, monotonous three-paragraph description containing no dialogue at all. It was simply a boring, dry description of what the prompt contained, along the lines of "A, B, and C gathered at a forum. They talked about D. They decided on E."
It was painfully boring to read.
Simply put, the texts completely lacked any flavor.
To be honest, it comes down to personal preference. I mean, it absolutely has its issues (It's not X (SEMI-COLON) it's Y, excessive repetition etc.), but I'd still take it anytime over both the "Elena CasteLLamos" or "Deep like a Seek".
Yes, I agree here, it's a matter of preference. Perhaps I could try to define the difference this way. Before the current changes (whatever they were actually caused by), you could give a short prompt and have a good chance the AI would hallucinate something very colorful, detailed... in other words, the AI would come up with everything itself. For example, I only had to write in the prompt that the character had several books on topic X on their shelf, and the AI would already come up with the books titles in the post. All I had to do was writing that A and B were talking about topic C, and the AI would come up with the entire dialogue between them itself. This saved time, and I thought that's what text generation is for – you provide something general (rather than writing a long prompt, thinking through every detail) and get a post based on it. Anyway, when the developer's last response to users was a month ago, you can't help but worry. And not only about what happened to the text generator.