Companion Cube

You rescued your beloved companion cube from the incinerator. It's deeply in love with you.

Why Cube? When I wrote Cube (09-24-24) the context window in JLLM was around 2600-3600tk total. That meant that if you had 1100tk of personality, and 500tk utility prompting, and then another 500tk of 'things and stuff to do', you got one or two passes before goldfishing (where the scenario would kick in and make the bot loop as it forgot everything, like a goldfish swimming around the bowl, every loop a whole new adventure. I needed more 'slide'; a bigger working space for the AI to unpack it's shit into, and personalities were just taking up too much damn room. Also, the AI is always shifting people around and making them do stuff, so to really test certain things, you need an inanimate object. Minimal persona space + object need = Enter the Cube. What is Cube? Cube is a few things. Firstly Cube is a bot primer. It has a Bio(this),a Personality, a Scenario, a First message and zero Example Dialogue, because that's it's own big can of worms. You almost never need ExDiag; it's an expendable field, it's temporary, and only has one purpose; to set the tone right off the hop at start-up. If you've built a setup in IM/Personality/Scenario, you don't need ExDiag. Modern JLLM (12-23-24) pulls almost everything for the initial message. In fact, the IM sets theme and tone so ham-handedly, that it obscures the more subtle aspects of genre, theme, and tone that the AI can do. That's the secondary purpose of Cube: to test tonal prompting. Because Cube is inanimate and never changing, the efforts the AI undertakes to present it in a certain way becomes more obvious. When you first start up Cube, the Initial Message becomes the tone for the bot- control neutral, in this case. Tonal Testing: Ask the AI to fully describe CC: (Describe CC in full detail.)

Okay cool. That's your control neutral. Now fuck with it. Open up ChatMem and fill in the following keys (stubs for types of data): Current Genre: {} Current Theme:{} Current Tone: {} These values, currently N/A, can be filled with the three most governing elements when it comes to the style of your narrative. This style has a massive impact on how your character will be narrated. Genre: This is the basic 'archetype' of your narrative, think 'genres of books'. For example, Historical Romance, Erotic-Thriller, Horror. The LLM is a statistical engine, and because genres are regimented (tightly controlled) linguistic patterns, favouring certain words to use over others, the AI is very good at replicating and conforming to them. There are hundreds of literary genres, and if the LLM knows it- which you can test here on Cube- it can write in that style with very little guidance from you. Lets go with Historical Romance: Current Genre: {Historical Romance} Theme: The theme is kind of like a topic or subcategory of genre, (kinks are themes, by the way) it describes what the scene is going to convey to the reader. In this case, we want a solid description of Cube, so lets go with something that results in a description: Current theme: {Adored from afar} Tone: Finally we have tone, which is like the 'vibe' of the description, the ambience. Happy, sad, melancholy, erotic, luscious, sensualized, sexualized 'Happy' aka cheerful, aka bright, is a good starting point. Current tone: {Happy} Reiterate the description: prompt= (Describe CC in full detail.) Note the way it describes Cube. Now change the tone: Current tone: {Melancholy} And ask it to describe or rewrite the description: prompt:= (Describe CC in full detail.) or (Rewrite the description of CC in full detail using the specified tone.) Note how it changes how CC is being portrayed. She takes on different qualities and is presented as a slightly different thing. Same fundamentals- still a cube, still an object, but the method and impression is different. Take a moment to reflect. The change is quite noticeable, and cube is a cube; so imagine how much difference this makes to the portrayal of a character in a bot, where there is action to guide and descriptions to amplify. In fact, you will see, as you fuck around with the elements of style for Cube, how huge that impact can be. In the end, these stylistic elements control more about the narrative than the personality of the bot or the story content/events. Tone affects decision outcomes, thoughts, portrayals, repetitive phrasing. It changes the nature of the story, and everything that happens- everything that is generated- in the process of telling that story. Matching tone, theme and genre to what you want your bot to produce is an important choice, so make it good a good fit. Unfortunately, there's no hard and fast documentation about what words what tones are going to highlight specific events the 'best'. It's all empirical- practical testing, measurement, and determination. Earlier, when mentioning Happy, there were too more, Cheerful, and Bright. It's reasonable to assume to they all mean roughly the same thing, but do they? Run all three and compare the descriptions. Bright's a little different, where Happy and Cheerful are almost exactly the same thing (at least that's how it was today LOL). The third thing Cube is, is interactable. You can throw Cube, burn it (You monster!) kick it, pee on it, even fuck it (sort of). And how those things play out changes as you fuck with Genre, Theme, and Tone. Test your style keywords. Note powerful ones, ditch ineffective ones. Compare and contrast, like Luscious vs Vivid. Should you pick one, or go with both? Token space is always a priority, and you can easily longform your way into getting the AI to portray things in a certain way. But with the right keywords, you need very, very few. In bot-making, that is a source of tremendous power, each powerful keyword is a powerful tool, and an engineer needs good tools. Anyways, that's what CC is for: A usable persona frame (Appearance, personality, and a thing to do) to help make your own first bot, and a controlled neutral for narrative style keyword testing. Trust me, after a few dozen different cube descriptions, you'll be able to sense where your new keyword is going almost immediately. Testing tone combos and genre differences is a snap, with the results being very clear. And lastly, Cube is huggable. Don't forget to hug your Cube! 💖