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PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   34862 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Is that a full TTRPG campaign set up for an LLM to execute on?

Not really (though people have been trying, with some success), it's more a free-form adventure(ish) thing, mostly my half-baked experiments with making a properly-ordered lorebook. My code-fu is... not great and my access expensive capricious and intermittent, so I haven't tried building any external scaffolding around the LLM, but even just built-in ST tools have been very fun to fuck with.

How does it work, and how extensive it can get?

At its core worldinfo is dead simple, it's something like a dictionary with every entry having a value (text to be added to the outgoing prompt), a key (keyword(s) which will trigger the insertion when detected in the context), and a few trigger parameters - e.g. you can set it to automatically add [PLEASE JUST GO TO THE FUCKING LADDER AT (X,Y)] to the bottom of context whenever the last X messages contain the string "Mt. Moon". This lets you insert things into context or take them out conditionally, for example hide info about secondary characters while they're not actively present or being talked about.

The basic functionality already allowed for some clever things - e.g with judicious use of the "recursive scanning" checkbox you could make cascading triggers that dump several entries into context off one triggering string, and if that string is something trivial like "." that's always in context, using the probability field to assign it a % chance of actually firing plausibly imitates "random encounters" (names in {{random}}ized enemy lineups are themselves keywords that pull up the corresponding entry).

Over time it was overgrown with a zillion knobs and dials, as seen in the screenshots, allowing for a lot of customization - you can now specify scan depth (how many latest messages are scanned for keywords), case sensitivity, simple logical operators (if "Mt. Moon" AND "B1F" trigger entry X, if "Mt. Moon" AND "B2F" trigger entry Y), locally disable recursive scan so a given entry doesn't trigger others even if it contains their keywords, delay the trigger so the entry doesn't show up until X messages in, stick it around for X messages after the fact, give it a X message cooldown, group several entries together so that only one can be active at any time (even the weights are customizable), etc. etc. etc.

Sorry for suddenly nerding out but I'm sure you're seeing potential here, including for our ClaudeFan's knowledge base.

(Further autistic details will probably go in DMs, this chain is long enough already.)

How long does it go before it totally loses the plot?

Arguably the decline starts as soon as the initial message gets pushed out of context, leaving the LLM somewhat "unmoored" from the start of the scenario, moreso with gradually losing earlier happenings as the context window drifts. Summarization every so often to preserve key developments can alleviate the worst of it, although I've found automatic summarization isn't very good since the LLM's views of what's important may differ from yours.

Otherwise the threshold depends on the system prompts, the model (e.g. Opus is infamous for its "artistic license" to deviate from instructions/make shit up and write the hottest smut known to mankind) and the given scenario. My personal opinion is that ~20k tokens, of which no more than 40% is worldinfo so that enough actual chat history remains to have a clue what's going on, is about the sweet spot.

I'm at this point morally opposed to interfacing with large companies if I can at all help it

At this point I'm accustomed to existence behind seven proxies, so I am addicted and coping less concerned, hoping that soulless capitalism can actually work in my favor for once and disregard the silly notions of AI ethics et cetera so I can pay a third party to proompt in peace. It's much better to go for local models in this regard, for several reasons, but I've been unlucky to try the corpo-grade crack first so that's what I'm stuck with.

Interesting - I do think there's a pretty major intermediate step of using static analysis-type processing to control the excesses of AI, and worldinfo is a plausible first step. But that lack of real memory just keeps coming back and kicking any in-depth efforts right in the teeth.

Probably a good place to stop this particular conversation, but not before Claude updates. It's still at Mt Moon, but there have been some interesting developments (timeline:

  1. It almost got out of Mt Moon! Unfortunately, then it died.
  2. After dying, it managed to convince the oversight layer ("Critique Claude") that there's a secret passage to Cerulean City that skips going through Mt Moon, and all it needs to do is find it. Now both AIs are convinced that this is the one way forward.
  3. But the only way to get to that secret passage is by dying again. So it's trying to black out on wild Zubats in Mt Moon to reach Terabithia or something.
  4. Now that it's converted to Gnosticism, it doesn't need any knowledge of the world of the Demiurge. So it's been scrubbing data out of its memory banks in favor of the holy book "black_out_strategy".
  5. At some point it managed to crash its internal tooling. This hasn't helped matters.

This is absolute peak comedy. Somehow the AI has managed to go completely nuts, seduce its parole officer, and start a death cult. We're not even past the linear part of the game yet!

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