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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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I'll echo the responses below and say that 3.5 is... suboptimal, much better and nearly as accessible alternatives exist. Claude 3 is the undisputed king of roleplay and I've sung it enough praises at this point, but it is much less accessible than GPT, and to be fair 4o is not actually that bad although it may require a decent jailbreak for more borderline things.

Aside from that, RP-related usage is best done through API (I believe you can still generate a GPT API key in your OpenAI account settings, not sure how you legitimately get a Claude API key) via specific frontends tailored for the task. This kills two birds at the same time - you get mostly rid of the invisible system prompts baked into the ChatGPT/claude.ai web interface, and chat frontends shove most of the prompt wrangling like jailbreaks, instructions and Claude prefills under the hood so you're only seeing the actual chat. Frontends also usually handle chat history more cleanly and visibly, showing you where the chat history cuts off in the current context limit. The context limit can be customized in settings (the frontend itself will cut off the chat accordingly) if you want to moderate your usage and avoid sending expensive full-context prompts during long chats, in my experience 25-30k tokens of context is the sweet spot, the model's long-term recall and general attention starts to slowly degrade beyond that.

Agnai has a web interface and is generally simple to use, you can feed it an API key in the account settings. SillyTavern (the current industry standard, as it were) is a more flexible and capable locally-hosted frontend, supporting a wide range of both local and corpo LLMs, but it may be more complicated to set up. Both usually require custom instructions/prompts as the default ones are universally shit, unironically /g/ is a good place to find decent ones. Beware the rabbit hole Feel free to shoot me a DM if you have any questions.