I'm burnt out (newer models rant)
Been wanting to make a post about how frustrated I feel since last year. I've been a semi consistent ST user since mid 2023 after the Cai exodus. The moment when I switched from the janky Pygmalion 7B to the (in retrospect, dumb and generic) Gpt 3.5, I felt like I was tapping into endless potential. Every story I could think of with any characters I could think of could be written by the AI without requiring much of my own input (I had very bad writing at the time and honestly was more for the novelty of it). The cracks started to show the moment the characters (and not just the LLM as the assistant, mind you!) themselves started lecturing me on consent and its importance like a high school help speech. I tried the same model on Poe that was tuned specifically for rp on ST. Results where interesting at first, the punctual refusal wasn't too much of a bother. Until it started unpromptly turning wholesome, completely sfw stories involving minor characters into an absolutely horrid attempt at a D/S dynamic. Ditched it ASAP. I saw the drummer's post on here about the UnslopNemo/Rocinante model and tried it out. I can confidently say it was the best model I ever used. It was very dumb and horny, but the prose was good enough and managed to stay with the format of the character. I kept using it well over a year after release. Deepsek released and I saw many posts about how good it was. And it was! At first. Then everyone saw how somewhere something unrelated happened while your character was butchered and turned into an offensive autistic stereotype. Honestly I never understood the appeal of DS. Sure it was more intelligent and open source, but beyond the initial hype wave everyone just seemed to glaze it. My OC characters became walking strawmen while erp cards felt bland. Then OR became nigh unusable because everyone was using the free tier for DS until none of the OR free models even worked 7 out of 10 times. I kept using Rocinante instead of Deepseek because it felt more natural and hadn't to pray to every single pantheon in existence just for it to work. I became frustrated and wanted to try out Cai... Needless to say it was so bad and painful it made the pedo Gpt seem like it spewed out masterpieces.
Fast forward to like eight months ago, I found a huge influx of new models being praised. Cydonia, Magidonia, Personality Engine, etc. I decided to try them out. What I found is that they are much better at sticking to your character's personality, but they ultimately fall into the same issues back at Deepsek R1. Excessive repetition, broken formatting, outside the world ending. The most outrageous to me isn't any of that, funnily enough. It's the fuckass format every single post DS model seems to use of (article, verb in present perfect, "while/as", verb in present continuous, adverb). Every single damned sentence is like that. Most of the time it doesn't even make sense! Like > I stopped, my eyes scanning the room suspiciously
Tf does that even mean? Why is it necessary to specify you stopped if you're already moving on to another action? Who says "eyes scanned"? Why is an adverb necessary in this sentence?
It's all like that. Plots go nowhere because its so deeply rooted in that format that it bleeds everywhere. No matter how many presets, prompts, instructions, temps, rep pens, cards, extensions guided generations I try. It's always the same. I think I'm done with this. It was fun at first but the novelty has worn out for me. And I didn't frequently rp either. There where entire months when I forgot I had ST installed. Rocinante X was just my final nail in the coffin. This will lead to nowhere. I'll just end up hating my OC's and worlds if I keep being spoonfed slop while everyone says it's the best thing ever.
I'll try focusing on real writing now. Maybe I'll make some more cards just for others to use. Or simply write fanfiction. This experience has only proved to me that AI cannot, and will never replace human art.
(Sorry for the long post, I really wanted to vent)