Playing AI Dungeon
Common Questions
The AI can only process a certain amount of information at a time, but a story can quickly become much larger than the context. This means the AI is only given the last part of your current Adventure and doesn’t consider anything written before that when generating new responses.
To compensate for this limited context size, AI Dungeon has Plot Components that always give the AI important information during gameplay. Author’s Note is used to give the AI details about the story’s genre(s), your preferred writing style, or overall tone. This text is sent to the AI toward the end of every player input to keep it informed about how it should generate a response.
Author’s Note can be added from the in-game settings of your current Adventure and the content edit popups. It can be up to 300 characters long, but most entries are well below that. Remember: Author’s Note does take up space in the limited amount of context sent to the AI every turn, so keep your entries as dense and concise as possible. Don’t worry about matching your writing style; the AI considers this text independently from story text. Some players choose to include details as simple, comma-separated keywords.
While Memory and Story Cards are treated as story text by the AI, Author’s Note text has special formatting applied that surrounds the entry with square brackets [ ] when it’s sent to the AI. In the stories that the AI was trained on, this was a common way authors would describe something about their story, so the AI now interprets square brackets as descriptive indicators about what should come next instead of actual story text. This means Author’s Note can be much more technical and out-of-character because these are instructions for how the AI should generate its next response. This is why Author’s Note is sent to the AI toward the end of every player input as opposed to the beginning like Memory and Story Cards are.
Using Author’s Note is completely optional for your games. Including this component may help the AI generate a more coherent and consistent story, but gameplay will still work without it.
Up to this point, you may have been using Author’s Note to accomplish what AI Instructions can now do more easily. But, both components can be used together to guide the AI into generating a coherent story.
While AI Instructions are included toward the beginning of the context, Authorʻs Note is inserted near the bottom, which means it has more of a direct influence on how the AI generates outputs. You shouldn’t add too much information here, or the AI is likely to focus on those details instead of what happened most recently in your Adventure. Our recommendation is to keep Authorʻs Note short, no more than 3 or 4 sentences, and only focus on a couple of key instructions about your story’s theme and setting that you want the AI to follow.
If AI Instructions is like talking to a customer support rep, Authorʻs Note is “Can I speak to the manager?” Try to address most issues in AI Instructions, and use Authorʻs Note when the AI Instructions isnʻt accomplishing what you need.
| AI Instructions | Author’s Note |
|---|---|
| List of general directions the AI should follow when generating new outputs. | Short list of 3-4 key instructions the AI should follow when generating new outputs. |
| Could be used for story instructions, style guidance, plot outline, topics/words to avoid, or description commands. | Could be used for specific scene instructions, setting guidelines, or theme reminders. |
Try to make your Author’s Notes dense but detailed. “Fantasy story” is too simple; instead, describe the story with more expressive words:
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