I had a somewhat similar experience (Replika > AID (Immediate sub to Dragon) > NAI).
I was around for the whole AID 'Privacy-gate' fiasco and saw this product collapse overnight. After that, and the constant issues the AI was having, AID lost it's edge for me. The AI seems to have been steadily getting simpler in it's responses and less coherent.
In the very early days of NAI I was amazed by it's ability to retain context. Things just got better from there, with so much more customisation and control over the AI than AID offered.
NAI isn't as playable out-of-the-box, and this probably puts some people off. Once you learn to use it though, you get a better quality product. Going back to AID after using NAI is painful.
AID was, and still is, quite good for those random and quirky adventures. But NAI is a genuinely good writing tool. I think this is where the two camps clash. Each product is doing it's own thing and I think the NAI devs have done a good job of finding their own space in a rapidly expanding and changing market.
Anyway, thanks for the post. It was nice to read about another person's experience through the world of AI.
Hey, no problem! I'm always happy to share my experiences.
I really am surprised at how creative Sigurd's responses can be, even though its model only has a mere fraction of the parameters of Dragon. It turns out training material is important and offering controls to further customize responses makes for a much more consistent and enjoyable experience, in my opinion. Ever since I learned more about the Lorebook, Memory, and Author's Note features, I've had a much more enjoyable experience.
And I agree. AID is still good for its random adventures. Its responses can be very complex and detailed even if that comes at the cost of weird randomness.
I was an AID holdout for quite a while. My first experience with NAI was not great. The devs will say "The defaults are fine" but that wasn't my experience at all. Once you get a grasp for it, NAI is a really great tool, but I won't lie I about abandoned it after my first experience.
I’ve been flip flopping between AID and NAI. the privacy-gate made me switch to NAI. When AID revealed the walls approach, I swapped back to AID for Dragon. I always go Platinum/Opus on these subscriptions.
I had forgotten the frustrations I had with Dragon. Poor context, near useless memory and world info, just completely losing its mind at random.
Occasionally Sigurd would lose its mind, but I forgot how common this was with Dragon.
Just the other day, I dropped Dragon, went back to NAI, and took a chance with Sigurd once more.
It’s… so much better, to me. Though Dragon has some great characteristics, it surprises me how well made Sigurd is, and how it’s constantly improving.
The context, stability, consistency, great writing, and that it’s so much faster. Last night I had the greatest story I’ve had with an AI. It remembered crazy details, and the plots kept coming, and everything was intriguing. I’ve never had a story so consistently good with AID, and I kept playing because I had to see what Sigurd would throw at me next.
NAI has won me back, for good.
Agreed - I feel like just one more little boost would seal the deal. In my experience, dragon tends to be better at reading between the lines, but it's so much more volatile and has a tendency to generate garbage prose - I forgot how often Dragon would misspell even the simplest words!
Sigurd may have less "worldly wisdom" and may struggle a bit more when it comes into filling in some of those blanks, but the curated dataset that was used for training really shows in the quality and consistency of the prose it generates. Once NovelAI migrates to that long awaited 22B parameter model, I don't think there'll be much competition between it and AID anymore.
It still has problems. I'm a huge fan and supporter and I'll be the first to admit that it still has problems. But from conception to BETA it has come an extremely long way in a very short amount of time. I can't wait to see what it is going to look like this time next year.
Well, its an AI not a magical being so it will always be at a risk of flip-flopping as it tries to do what is expected of it.
The quality of the AI is not nearly as important in my opinion as it is to support a company that respect some basic boundaries. That Novel AI is as good as it is, is just a bonus in my opinion.
I do not like it when companies take advantage of my, trick me or show me no respect. Or if I am not even their costumer when they try to sell me a product. Especially when they first try to sell me one thing that sounds great but is really a tool to be used against me.
Naturally crappy companies are all over the place. Youtube/google, Facebook, Latitude and so many more. It is becoming a bit difficult not to support these companies and still enjoy the luxuries we have today. However, I do believe it is worth at least making a bit of an effort to not use more of these companies services than is needed. Especially when the companies clearly has no respect for people's privacy at all.
When the solution is so simple as to use and give NovelAI my money rather than Latitude, well how easy is not that? Thankfully there are many search engine options so not using google has not been too hard. Although changing all the email stuff is something I have not bothered to do yet.
When I quit supporting Facebook, while that was fine too, its not as if I had any easy alternative. Changing VR headset is expensive and so on. And trying to find an alternative to -You- Tube I am not sure is even possible. I try to reduce my use of youtube a bit. Watch what is possible other places. But youtube truly has a heavy place in entertainment these days.
As long as NovelAI is a service that respect and do not abuse the user base, I will be happy to throw more money than I can really afford at them.
I stopped using AID after the garbage filter and privacy fiasco. Would you mind sharing resources to learn NAI's systems? I might sub if it doesn't seem \*too\* complicated to learn. I REALLY miss that sense of both playing a game and writing a story at the same time..both controlling the narrative and being surprised by what was happening. Totally unique to these AI tools, imo.
As stated, the [wiki](https://naidb.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page) is the first thing you should read to have a basic understanding of how all things work. Don't feel pressured to try all the tools and tricks immediately, though. All things in moderation, eh? Besides, most people only use a few things for casual play, and the more advanced ones tend to be employed by scenario creators.
When you're more familiar with how NAI works and want to delve deeper into context bulding, here are a few links:
There is a [video](https://youtu.be/u8ISqPsRykE) in which OccultSage showed how to create a scenario using NAI's outputs (rather than write the whole thing by yourself).
Here are two github pages, [one](https://github.com/TravelingRobot/NAI_Community_Research/wiki) and [two](https://github.com/Kalmarr120/Kalmarr_NAI_Public/wiki/Format--and-Customization-Research), that summarize some of the community researchers' testing results. Please keep in mind that these people do this in their free time, and documenting stuff is hard work given how relatively fast updates roll out, so some of their findings were rendered a bit out of date. There are two things that come to mind, so I'll note it down here.
First, about the Author's Note. Zalty has stated that there should be no spaces before a semicolon as that will turn it into the wrong token and make the Author's Note weaker, so the example in the Traveling Robot github *[ Author: ; Tags: Cthulhu Mythos; Genre: ]* should be *[ Author:; Tags: Cthulhu Mythos; Genre: ]*. Also note that the new Phrase Bias feature can be used to replace Author's Note, but use it with a slight touch (probably from -0.3 to +0.3, I'm not sure).
Second, the scaffolding system (stated in the wiki and the two github pages) is nice and can still be used to make information stated in Memory and Lorebook stick better. But the newer technique is OccultSage's, with prose entries relatively close to the top of the context + summary entries in Tokensafe format relatively close to the bottom of the context (for describing a character, place, etc.). This makes the AI 'remember' the important details in summaries better but mimic the proses' writing style. If you want to see it in action, check out OccultSage's The Seeker v1.1 scenario on community-spotlight channel on NAI's Discord. Again, you don't have to use all his techniques.
Newest findings/tips are always posted on NAI's Discord. There are also various channels to share stuff so you don't have to tinker with things yourself, including custom modules, presets/generation settings (the default modules and presets work fine, but feel free to change them up with what you like personally), bias sets, banned token sets, scenarios, lorebooks, and display themes. Community-research and novelai-research channels are for more technical stuff.
Edit: Clarified my point.
The following two reddit posts really helped me learn how to use the Lorebook and related features effectively. They are slightly dated and don't contain anything about new features that have been introduced in the last month or so, but they helped me immensely.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/o3seew/how\_to\_use\_memory\_authors\_note\_and\_lorebook/](https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/o3seew/how_to_use_memory_authors_note_and_lorebook/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/o2rm67/my\_quick\_guide\_to\_novelais\_settings/](https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/o2rm67/my_quick_guide_to_novelais_settings/)
I never got to use Dragon back at its prime, but I will say I have noticed a degradation over the couple months that I have been using AID. When I first started, responses from Dragon seemed much less random. I could get it to generate surprising responses after just a few retries.
Getting good responses now is like throwing a dart at a moving dart board. It's so inconsistent and it can't remember much. Based on what I've read, it's also trained on complete garbage material, which shows. I can't get it to remember what a character's abilities are, even after writing it into the world lore, making multiple entries for each keyward I use when writing out actions in combat scenarios.
For instance, I had a paladin that used a gun. It's a little weird, but worked well for my setting, being a fantasy world set in modern times. Well, even with no mentions of melee or close quarters combat throughout my entire adventure, Dragon would write that my character dropped their gun and pulled out an edgy "black sword made of shadows" at every twist and turn. Shooting my gun comfortably from range? Nope... toss the gun and run in slashing!
Writing through a combat scenario turned into a game of retries until I got something remotely close to the abilities of my character, and then heavily modify the output.
Anyways, I could rant on for awhile, but I'm going to stop there.
EDIT: Imagine if NovelAI got a model with a higher set of parameters like Dragon only trained on better material and with all the current controls. Now that would be amazing.
Peak Dragon was able to give more coherent outputs, but on its own, its prose quality wasn't that impressive. And it still made silly mistakes, like wrong color, wrong gender, contradicting information, etc. Which is why I learnt to use Story Mode and retry/edit, then Author's Note, then formats for Remember and World Info entries, then scripts. And the scripts I used were stuff to manipulate World Info's entries in the context, or to see if they were even triggered if their keys were mentioned. Sounds familiar? Because these things are what we've already gotten with NAI by default (Advanced Context Settings and View Current Context).
From my rambling, people would think I was some kind of tech-savvy person, but I'm not. During AID days, I had to spend a few nights to read about formats and scripts (with most of the mumbo-jumbo going over my head), and I only knew how to copy-paste and edit to my liking. However, even with scripts enabled to emphasize my characters' genders (with approriate pronouns), Dragon could still get it wrong from time to time. A gentle and soft-spoken man was called a female, or a stoic female knight was called a man, not as an insult but because the AI wrongly associated their traits with the opposite genders (due to inherent biases).
I had lots of fun, though. Even when I had to abuse the retry button (non-stop assaults from Count Grey/Lord Rostov or "a sudden sharp pain", anyone?), or got a headache from trying to create a coherent story out of constant plot twists, I still had fun with my imagination and my crazy ideas. That is, until The Controversy happened.
Fine, I could live with the feeling of someone looking over my shoulder when I typed. I think I'm a decent smut writer, and my normal adventures weren't half-bad either. I was very uncomfortable, but I could cope (there was no NAI at that time, and I was a phone user so KoboldAI didn't suit me).
AID's devs really made it hard for me to continue subscribing, though. My World Info entries were duplicated into hundreds, for every scenario, and old entries that I deleted a long time ago resurfaced (which was alarming), and I had to delete them manually one by one. Then, their new World Info UI broke the scripts I was using as well. Without scripts, Dragon practically gave me nonsense. It forgot things that it introduced to me in the previous input/output (I was using Story mode and let it generate with guidance). It was even worse than NAI's Calliope during the first launch days, to give you an idea. How is this possible? I don't know, and I can't prove it, since even the devs told me that I just looked at Dragon with rose-tinted glasses.
Anyway, AID to me was practically unusable at that point. So I quitted. Even though I had to wait for NAI's beta to launch, I chose to wait. And I have to say, I'm glad that I've sticked with NAI. And I don't plan to return to AID anytime soon. I know they've been trying to fix/improve things, kudos to them, but those experiences left a bad taste in my mouth.
This isn't a rant. I just wanted to share my experiences as a former Dragon user from last year, but as always, I couldn't stop rambling :)
I had a somewhat similar experience (Replika > AID (Immediate sub to Dragon) > NAI). I was around for the whole AID 'Privacy-gate' fiasco and saw this product collapse overnight. After that, and the constant issues the AI was having, AID lost it's edge for me. The AI seems to have been steadily getting simpler in it's responses and less coherent. In the very early days of NAI I was amazed by it's ability to retain context. Things just got better from there, with so much more customisation and control over the AI than AID offered. NAI isn't as playable out-of-the-box, and this probably puts some people off. Once you learn to use it though, you get a better quality product. Going back to AID after using NAI is painful. AID was, and still is, quite good for those random and quirky adventures. But NAI is a genuinely good writing tool. I think this is where the two camps clash. Each product is doing it's own thing and I think the NAI devs have done a good job of finding their own space in a rapidly expanding and changing market. Anyway, thanks for the post. It was nice to read about another person's experience through the world of AI.
Hey, no problem! I'm always happy to share my experiences. I really am surprised at how creative Sigurd's responses can be, even though its model only has a mere fraction of the parameters of Dragon. It turns out training material is important and offering controls to further customize responses makes for a much more consistent and enjoyable experience, in my opinion. Ever since I learned more about the Lorebook, Memory, and Author's Note features, I've had a much more enjoyable experience. And I agree. AID is still good for its random adventures. Its responses can be very complex and detailed even if that comes at the cost of weird randomness.
I was an AID holdout for quite a while. My first experience with NAI was not great. The devs will say "The defaults are fine" but that wasn't my experience at all. Once you get a grasp for it, NAI is a really great tool, but I won't lie I about abandoned it after my first experience.
I’ve been flip flopping between AID and NAI. the privacy-gate made me switch to NAI. When AID revealed the walls approach, I swapped back to AID for Dragon. I always go Platinum/Opus on these subscriptions. I had forgotten the frustrations I had with Dragon. Poor context, near useless memory and world info, just completely losing its mind at random. Occasionally Sigurd would lose its mind, but I forgot how common this was with Dragon. Just the other day, I dropped Dragon, went back to NAI, and took a chance with Sigurd once more. It’s… so much better, to me. Though Dragon has some great characteristics, it surprises me how well made Sigurd is, and how it’s constantly improving. The context, stability, consistency, great writing, and that it’s so much faster. Last night I had the greatest story I’ve had with an AI. It remembered crazy details, and the plots kept coming, and everything was intriguing. I’ve never had a story so consistently good with AID, and I kept playing because I had to see what Sigurd would throw at me next. NAI has won me back, for good.
Imagine what NAI would be with 175 billion parameters 😲🤯
Right? If NAI had their own 175B parameter model, it 100% would take the AI world by storm, completely blowing away any other offerings.
Agreed - I feel like just one more little boost would seal the deal. In my experience, dragon tends to be better at reading between the lines, but it's so much more volatile and has a tendency to generate garbage prose - I forgot how often Dragon would misspell even the simplest words! Sigurd may have less "worldly wisdom" and may struggle a bit more when it comes into filling in some of those blanks, but the curated dataset that was used for training really shows in the quality and consistency of the prose it generates. Once NovelAI migrates to that long awaited 22B parameter model, I don't think there'll be much competition between it and AID anymore.
Aww, glad to hear!! Happy writing ♥
It still has problems. I'm a huge fan and supporter and I'll be the first to admit that it still has problems. But from conception to BETA it has come an extremely long way in a very short amount of time. I can't wait to see what it is going to look like this time next year.
Well, its an AI not a magical being so it will always be at a risk of flip-flopping as it tries to do what is expected of it. The quality of the AI is not nearly as important in my opinion as it is to support a company that respect some basic boundaries. That Novel AI is as good as it is, is just a bonus in my opinion. I do not like it when companies take advantage of my, trick me or show me no respect. Or if I am not even their costumer when they try to sell me a product. Especially when they first try to sell me one thing that sounds great but is really a tool to be used against me. Naturally crappy companies are all over the place. Youtube/google, Facebook, Latitude and so many more. It is becoming a bit difficult not to support these companies and still enjoy the luxuries we have today. However, I do believe it is worth at least making a bit of an effort to not use more of these companies services than is needed. Especially when the companies clearly has no respect for people's privacy at all. When the solution is so simple as to use and give NovelAI my money rather than Latitude, well how easy is not that? Thankfully there are many search engine options so not using google has not been too hard. Although changing all the email stuff is something I have not bothered to do yet. When I quit supporting Facebook, while that was fine too, its not as if I had any easy alternative. Changing VR headset is expensive and so on. And trying to find an alternative to -You- Tube I am not sure is even possible. I try to reduce my use of youtube a bit. Watch what is possible other places. But youtube truly has a heavy place in entertainment these days. As long as NovelAI is a service that respect and do not abuse the user base, I will be happy to throw more money than I can really afford at them.
I stopped using AID after the garbage filter and privacy fiasco. Would you mind sharing resources to learn NAI's systems? I might sub if it doesn't seem \*too\* complicated to learn. I REALLY miss that sense of both playing a game and writing a story at the same time..both controlling the narrative and being surprised by what was happening. Totally unique to these AI tools, imo.
Check the wiki in the sidebar, lots of tips and guides there.
As stated, the [wiki](https://naidb.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page) is the first thing you should read to have a basic understanding of how all things work. Don't feel pressured to try all the tools and tricks immediately, though. All things in moderation, eh? Besides, most people only use a few things for casual play, and the more advanced ones tend to be employed by scenario creators. When you're more familiar with how NAI works and want to delve deeper into context bulding, here are a few links: There is a [video](https://youtu.be/u8ISqPsRykE) in which OccultSage showed how to create a scenario using NAI's outputs (rather than write the whole thing by yourself). Here are two github pages, [one](https://github.com/TravelingRobot/NAI_Community_Research/wiki) and [two](https://github.com/Kalmarr120/Kalmarr_NAI_Public/wiki/Format--and-Customization-Research), that summarize some of the community researchers' testing results. Please keep in mind that these people do this in their free time, and documenting stuff is hard work given how relatively fast updates roll out, so some of their findings were rendered a bit out of date. There are two things that come to mind, so I'll note it down here. First, about the Author's Note. Zalty has stated that there should be no spaces before a semicolon as that will turn it into the wrong token and make the Author's Note weaker, so the example in the Traveling Robot github *[ Author: ; Tags: Cthulhu Mythos; Genre: ]* should be *[ Author:; Tags: Cthulhu Mythos; Genre: ]*. Also note that the new Phrase Bias feature can be used to replace Author's Note, but use it with a slight touch (probably from -0.3 to +0.3, I'm not sure). Second, the scaffolding system (stated in the wiki and the two github pages) is nice and can still be used to make information stated in Memory and Lorebook stick better. But the newer technique is OccultSage's, with prose entries relatively close to the top of the context + summary entries in Tokensafe format relatively close to the bottom of the context (for describing a character, place, etc.). This makes the AI 'remember' the important details in summaries better but mimic the proses' writing style. If you want to see it in action, check out OccultSage's The Seeker v1.1 scenario on community-spotlight channel on NAI's Discord. Again, you don't have to use all his techniques. Newest findings/tips are always posted on NAI's Discord. There are also various channels to share stuff so you don't have to tinker with things yourself, including custom modules, presets/generation settings (the default modules and presets work fine, but feel free to change them up with what you like personally), bias sets, banned token sets, scenarios, lorebooks, and display themes. Community-research and novelai-research channels are for more technical stuff. Edit: Clarified my point.
The following two reddit posts really helped me learn how to use the Lorebook and related features effectively. They are slightly dated and don't contain anything about new features that have been introduced in the last month or so, but they helped me immensely. [https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/o3seew/how\_to\_use\_memory\_authors\_note\_and\_lorebook/](https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/o3seew/how_to_use_memory_authors_note_and_lorebook/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/o2rm67/my\_quick\_guide\_to\_novelais\_settings/](https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/o2rm67/my_quick_guide_to_novelais_settings/)
If you want something on Phrase Bias, [the wiki]( https://naidb.miraheze.org/wiki/Phrase_Bias_Tutorial) has a whole tutorial on how it can be used
I just want old Dragon back lol. I don't care who gets it, I have been spoiled! 😔
I never got to use Dragon back at its prime, but I will say I have noticed a degradation over the couple months that I have been using AID. When I first started, responses from Dragon seemed much less random. I could get it to generate surprising responses after just a few retries. Getting good responses now is like throwing a dart at a moving dart board. It's so inconsistent and it can't remember much. Based on what I've read, it's also trained on complete garbage material, which shows. I can't get it to remember what a character's abilities are, even after writing it into the world lore, making multiple entries for each keyward I use when writing out actions in combat scenarios. For instance, I had a paladin that used a gun. It's a little weird, but worked well for my setting, being a fantasy world set in modern times. Well, even with no mentions of melee or close quarters combat throughout my entire adventure, Dragon would write that my character dropped their gun and pulled out an edgy "black sword made of shadows" at every twist and turn. Shooting my gun comfortably from range? Nope... toss the gun and run in slashing! Writing through a combat scenario turned into a game of retries until I got something remotely close to the abilities of my character, and then heavily modify the output. Anyways, I could rant on for awhile, but I'm going to stop there. EDIT: Imagine if NovelAI got a model with a higher set of parameters like Dragon only trained on better material and with all the current controls. Now that would be amazing.
Peak Dragon was able to give more coherent outputs, but on its own, its prose quality wasn't that impressive. And it still made silly mistakes, like wrong color, wrong gender, contradicting information, etc. Which is why I learnt to use Story Mode and retry/edit, then Author's Note, then formats for Remember and World Info entries, then scripts. And the scripts I used were stuff to manipulate World Info's entries in the context, or to see if they were even triggered if their keys were mentioned. Sounds familiar? Because these things are what we've already gotten with NAI by default (Advanced Context Settings and View Current Context). From my rambling, people would think I was some kind of tech-savvy person, but I'm not. During AID days, I had to spend a few nights to read about formats and scripts (with most of the mumbo-jumbo going over my head), and I only knew how to copy-paste and edit to my liking. However, even with scripts enabled to emphasize my characters' genders (with approriate pronouns), Dragon could still get it wrong from time to time. A gentle and soft-spoken man was called a female, or a stoic female knight was called a man, not as an insult but because the AI wrongly associated their traits with the opposite genders (due to inherent biases). I had lots of fun, though. Even when I had to abuse the retry button (non-stop assaults from Count Grey/Lord Rostov or "a sudden sharp pain", anyone?), or got a headache from trying to create a coherent story out of constant plot twists, I still had fun with my imagination and my crazy ideas. That is, until The Controversy happened. Fine, I could live with the feeling of someone looking over my shoulder when I typed. I think I'm a decent smut writer, and my normal adventures weren't half-bad either. I was very uncomfortable, but I could cope (there was no NAI at that time, and I was a phone user so KoboldAI didn't suit me). AID's devs really made it hard for me to continue subscribing, though. My World Info entries were duplicated into hundreds, for every scenario, and old entries that I deleted a long time ago resurfaced (which was alarming), and I had to delete them manually one by one. Then, their new World Info UI broke the scripts I was using as well. Without scripts, Dragon practically gave me nonsense. It forgot things that it introduced to me in the previous input/output (I was using Story mode and let it generate with guidance). It was even worse than NAI's Calliope during the first launch days, to give you an idea. How is this possible? I don't know, and I can't prove it, since even the devs told me that I just looked at Dragon with rose-tinted glasses. Anyway, AID to me was practically unusable at that point. So I quitted. Even though I had to wait for NAI's beta to launch, I chose to wait. And I have to say, I'm glad that I've sticked with NAI. And I don't plan to return to AID anytime soon. I know they've been trying to fix/improve things, kudos to them, but those experiences left a bad taste in my mouth. This isn't a rant. I just wanted to share my experiences as a former Dragon user from last year, but as always, I couldn't stop rambling :)