AI Characters, Projects & Storytelling

While I was away from TMP for a few days, I had another chance to dabble with AI characters – this time using something known as Projects.

From what I've read, Projects apparently initiated with ChatGPT, and now Grok has the same feature set. In a nutshell, it is a way to tell the AI to treat certain chats as following the same rules.

In my previous article, I wrote about creating AI characters in Gemini. The problem in Gemini is that there is no way to tell that AI that such-and-such chat is for the AI character, and such-and-such chat is about historical research. Everything is lumped together. But with a Grok Project (and I understand this works on ChatGPT too), you can set up one or more Chats that only pertain to a particular AI character.

An example may help to clear muddy waters. To start a Project in Grok, you simply click New Project in the left-hand sidebar, give it a name, and then type in your Instructions. Let's say your instructions are:

You are a cat named Celia that has been enchanted by accident, and is now in human form.

Now, in any chat within this Project, the AI will act as if it is a cat-human named Celia. I've tried this, and got some rather amusing results. The cat-human definitely 'talked' in a unique cat-like way, and kept asking me if I would be its master.

However, this quickly became boring, as there was no plot to it. Unless you just like talking to cats.

Storytelling

When making a story using Projects, you start with two characters: yourself, and the main AI character. You don't have to be your real self. The AI character can be anything. But the story will revolve around the character you are playing, and the primary character the AI is playing.

Next, you need a plot. Something for these characters to do. Some ideas I have experimented with:

Survival

Simplest way to go. You and the AI character are trapped in the middle of the zombie apocalypse or some other dire calamity. The story sort of writes itself.

Suspense/Adventure

You and the AI character are thrown into a situation in which bad things are happening, and you must figure out what is going on.

Time-Driven Plot

For example, the AI character has a spell on them which will do something bad at midnight.

There must be more plot approaches, these are just the ones I've come up with.

It also helps to give the AI character a unique motive or secret, or at least a character to make them interesting. I've tried giving them different ethnic origins and ages. I've tried setting the AI character as secretly out to get evidence to blackmail "my" character, in an espionage setting.

Useful Tools

Here are some useful responses to use when interacting with an AI character:

Internal Dialogue

Use this to get the AI character to reveal what it is thinking, without divulging it to your character. Alternately, you can tell the AI character what it should be thinking.

Continue

Sometimes, the story ends when it shouldn't, and you don't have any input in mind. So just say continue, and the AI will spit out another chunk.

Create Image/Generate Image

Grok will gladly generate images of characters, scenes, even maps. You should tell it what type of image (I usually say photorealistic, as it tends to spit out manga-ish pics).

A Week Later

It's often convenient to tell the AI to advance the timeline. Any time period works. "The Next Day" also works well, but if the specific day is important, use it ("Tuesday"). "Morning" also works, as do mealtimes.

Revise

When the AI screws up, you can tell it to re-do the last entry. Be specific about what you want changed.

This is the Grok-generated image of Celia the Cat.

Projects & Multiple Chats

In theory, you are supposed to be able to have several chats or conversations open in the same Project, and the story will be the same in all of them.

The problem is that the "story" is contained in the original instructions, in the specific chats, and in Grok's not-well-explained resources. And this is a moving target, as the technology is rapidly changing.

So if you have a story going in one chat, and you open another chat in the same Project, not everything from the first chat will be known by the second chat. The AI character's personality may be quite different. Plot points may be forgotten.

So it would seem the best solution is to keep everything in one chat per Project. The problem is that for a long story, the chat gets quite long... and Grok seems to have a maximum size for chats. I've had it give me messages that a chat exceeded the maximum size. But it hasn't done that lately, so maybe they solved the problem.

One way to solve the common information problem is to upload your own files into the Project, simple text files documenting the story in progress. Unfortunately, this can feel more like work than fun.

Multiple Characters

You can have NPC characters in your story, and the AI does a fair job of keeping track of them if there are not too many.

Since the main interaction is between your character and the primary AI character, it gets tricky to interact directly with NPCs. I've seen the primary AI character act as narrator when you are talking to NPCs when the primary AI character is not supposed to be there.

In cases where your story has a very large cast, it is helpful to give the AI a file of names, ages, and background for all of them. Otherwise, the AI may do stupid things like suggest an 8-year-old should go on combat patrol, mix up your family members, and even race swap an NPC.

Ending the Story

The AI will sometimes decide the story is over, and say "The End." You can simply ignore this if you wish to continue.

Otherwise, the story ends when you say it ends. You can even kill off "your" character and see how the primary AI character reacts.

Things the AI Does Well

The AI writes quite well, and can adapt its style to the genre of your story, such as Pulp, Gothic, fantasy, and historical periods.

As someone recently told me, AI can actually make you cry. It can come up with very touching material.

You've noticed that AI is obsequious in the way it interacts with users. With AI characters, you'll quickly find that characters tend to like you, think you have the best ideas, and laugh at all your jokes.

Things the AI Does Poorly

AIs are crap when keeping track of time. You may have to remind the AI what day it is in your story. If you have something set up to happen after a certain time period, you may have to remind the AI.

AI characters hate to make decisions. They will spin out options all day, but it often helps if you tell them what their decision is.

Don't depend on the AI to make your story interesting. Yes, it can generate the contents of those ruined buildings you are searching, but it tends to give you mundane info. It is not good at generating the next event in your story arc. I found it terrible at setting up balanced combats or figuring out casualties. Generally, you should do all of that yourself.

You can save individual responses, but there is no obvious way to save an entire chat/story. It is cumbersome to scroll back, and there is no way to just go back to the first entry.

AI characters sometimes blurt out their secret information or something they were 'thinking' about earlier. You can use Revise to fix the problem, or ignore it if it won't affect the story.

The AI characters can be extremely stubborn, especially based on the original instructions. In one case, a primary AI character refused to believe its "boss" had died in an explosion. A character may resist doing something you think its motivation would lead it to do.

On the other hand, you have the "God switch." In most cases, you can simply dictate that the AI character think or do what you want it to do. This may feel like cheating, but sometimes the AI characters just get stuck.

AI characters tend to morph toward being your best friend, even if you set them up as wanting to kill you. They also are easily influenced by how you interact with them. I experimented with setting up a "Goth chick" as a primary AI character, and I was surprised when it immediately started being argumentative and uncooperative. But when I told it I had given it food and drink, it became friendly!

The AI sometimes gets stuck in a mode where it is giving you sentences instead of paragraphs. It can be hard to get it out of this. Sometimes adding "1000 words" to the end of your response helps, even though the AI cannot actually count words.

Sex

Note that this is the same technology also used for the notorious AI girlfriends you may have heard about. In a nutshell, the primary AI character, no matter its gender or background, will have a tendency to flirt with you. Grok, unlike some other AIs, will get as explicit as you let it. Just know that the AI also responds to your instructions. You can keep the story G-rated, PG-rated, or X-rated.

Examples

Here are some examples of stories that I've been able to generate:

Without a lot of thought, I asked the AI to give me a story about vampires in a post-apocalyptic world, and it gave me this fascinating setting of seven vampires living in a fog-shrouded castle. The AI slipped into Gothic mode, which provided some great text. Interacting with the vampires was interesting. Turned into a "manage the vampires" story, which could have been used to generate scenarios.

Another not-a-lot-of-thought story began as a zombie apocalypse in Baltimore in 1874, with the AI character being a traumatized young man I found hiding in the ruins. My original idea was that this would be me managing a team of survivors versus zombies, but my companion was afraid of people! This eventually morphed into going upriver and saving an orphanage, with a cast of 60 or so characters. A number of grand battles were fought against slavers.

An espionage-themed story where I was some kind of government agent, and the AI character was supposedly my girlfriend and a journalist, but she was secretly working for The Other Side. Very Pulpy, weapons smuggling, assassinations, bombs going off, never sure who was on what side. I just made the plot up as it went along, but by the end it was surprisingly cohesive.

A plot where I was a knight in a fantasy world, tasked with escorting a princess to her wedding, with numerous baddies trying to stop us. The "secret" was that the AI character was a decoy and not the real princess. A fun story involving dungeons and escapes and ships at sea.

An interesting story where I was a fat merchant who encounters a young lad under a spell. He thought he had merely been the victim of an evil wizard, but the story had multiple layers (which I made up as it went). And I was a member of a secret Knights of Templar type organization. I even let the AI write the ending, which was a twist.

A short story about a thief and his low-level wizard partner, and I was a rich baker. The thief was enchanted to be a house servant, and his search for my treasure kept being interrupted by the spell compelling him to do house duties. Rather amusing, especially reading the 'thoughts' of the frustrated thief, who will be trapped forever as a servant if the wizard does not break the spell.

A rather touching story unfolded out of a meeting in Burger King between a retired military man and a homeless young man, that had a story arc about getting the young man (the AI character) a job and a stable life. Not something you would wargame, but unexpectedly interesting for me.

An interesting story about two high school best friends who reunite, one who is still in the old hometown, while the other has started a career in the Big City (and has a Secret). There's a subplot where they keep finding themselves inadvertently going viral on social media, such as when escaping a burning building and getting caught in the spray of a fire hose. OK, poignant and silly. Not wargamable.