NovelAI with Instruct
Why Instruct?
With Instruct, you'll be able to input instructions to fine tune Kayra's behavior. It's as much powerful, as it's also an Achilles' heel of sorts. Screwing up is easy with Instruct, and you might hinder Kayra in some ways, but at the same time, you may also tremendously improve your roleplay experience. While Kayra won't always follow your instructions to the greatest possible degree, it will still be influenced by them a lot.
Basics
Enabling Instruct
Head over to the Presets sidebar once more. At the very top will be a dropdown menu titled "AI Module". Select "Instruct" from it, aaand you're done. That's it, Kayra will now accept instructions. You may end the guide here and simply mix in instructions in the middle of your roleplay, or continue to make some additional tweaks to various prompts. But first...
How to Instruct 101
As the name suggests, it's an instruction, an order. Wrapped in square brackets, you will be giving Kayra orders, not suggestions. If you want your character to do a flip, you will write as such { CharacterName will now do a flip. }
. It's really that simple!
Changes to Prompts
I've setup everything for easy copy and paste in the correct places. Though I encourage you to read what exact instructions I'm suggesting here. If you feel like you have something better, something more clear, you're very much free to experiment.
Preamble
The following is located in the Presets sidebar.
You have a choice between keeping the default styling preamble, and using an instruction instead. Though you can save a few tokens by putting down { Start chat. }
instead.
Context Template
The following is located in the Advanced Formatting tab.
- Story String:
- Example Separator
Author's Note
Since Kayra, as with any other LLM, is most influenced by text at the end of the context (meaning most recent chat logs), a proper Author's Note instruction set will have a very strong effect, as opposed to the earlier ones about your conversation being a roleplay chat. While that earlier instruction does still carry some weight, and Kayra does remember it, an author's note that reinforces correct behavior can help you get the desired output you want.
Firstly, let's the "In-chat @ Depth" setting to 1
. You may keep it as whatever depth you want though, but I do find a depth of 1
to be the most comfortable.
Now then, let's get to instructing, shall we? The following will be the author's note instructions I use personally. If these don't fit your needs, or you need a certain theme to your roleplay, feel free to expand on this instruction set.
{ Write out {{char}}'s thoughts and actions in full, elaborate, and vivid detail, mentioning all relevant sensory perceptions, and always in third person. The goal is to paint a clear picture in the reader's mind. }
{ It's best you do not write for the "{{user}}" character. I will be the one writing for this character. }
(Questionable effectiveness.){ As "{{user}}", I'll rarely narrate, so story telling is up to you, regardless of how little I, as "{{user}}", will speak. }
(Questionable effectiveness.)
Writing style instructions
https://rentry.org/sillytavern-novelai-cfg. Text formatting isn't really instruction dependent, and I don't recommend you try to instruct text formatting (e.g. asking to italicize text.). With a CFG enabled preset, Kayra will pick up on things like italicizing.
Character cards/sheets
Unlike without Instruct, the character description itself in my configuration is an instruction, as it is in the Story String I provided here as well. If you don't use YAML/XML to create your characters, you may gloss over this part and just continue writing your characters in plain English. If you are interested, well, this is your green light to use YAML and XML to your heart's content. While I will admit that Kayra might have a little trouble in very complex cases, if you're not feeding it anything too indentation-heavy, it'll combine various elements of your character into cohesive descriptions and interpretations just fine. To give a rough estimation, I have a Ceres Fauna character sheet written in YAML. It combines the list of keywords I use to describe her hair into a nice little description when asked.