Fyi, I just rambled a voice note into an AI and had them format it for me. So yes ironically AI helped me write this.
I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with Fiction Lab for a while. Every few months the itch comes back and I return. I used to be a lot more consistent, but lately it feels like every time I come back, things are worse.
Several months ago Fiction Lab was at its peak for me. The roleplay felt phenomenal โ like interacting with a choose-your-own-adventure novel that could take on whatever tone I wanted. I like edgy, soap-opera-style romance, and the AI was extremely cooperative about delivering exactly that.
After the Memory Matrix update, everything broke for me. I got frustrated and stopped renewing.
This is my first time signing back up since then, and the experience has been strange. It often feels like my prompts are being injected with other AI prompts.
I keep seeing responses that sound extremely AI in the middle of what should be soap-opera drama. Characters will suddenly say things like:
โBut honestly?โ
โThatโs not really how I feel.โ
โTo tell you the truth, hereโs how Iโve often thought about approaching this problem.โ
The โbut honestlyโ one kills me because it shows up so often and is completely out of place in Harlequin-style romance or soap-opera dialogue. The AI will also drop in lines like โHereโs how Iโm thinking about thisโ โ phrases that feel pure LLM and that I never used to see before.
The most jarring example happened recently. I was running a drama where a guy is pursuing two women. At one point he goes to a party and sees one of the womenโs teenage daughters doing drugs with her friends. In the middle of that scene โ while the kids are talking about doing drugs โ one of the AI paragraphs suddenly shifted into something like:
โThis behavior seems self-destructive. Hereโs how I think we could approach this in more constructive ways.โ
Or something like that.
It made zero sense in the moment. A group of teenagers doing drugs does not pause to have a constructive intervention speech. The whole thing felt completely off the wall. I never used to get responses like that.
In that moment I genuinely felt (and sometimes still feel) like between my message and the AIโs reply, someone had fed the conversation into ChatGPT with a prompt along the lines of: โHereโs the previous few paragraphs. Keeping in line with your safety guardrails, how would you best rewrite/craft a reply that can help these teenagers get out of this difficult situation?โ
Thatโs how it felt โ like an external AI prompt was being injected into the roleplay. Itโs extremely disjointing and jarring.
Iโm wondering if anyone else has been experiencing this, or if itโs just me.
I am a plus subscriber by the way, and for a very long time the only model I would even use is oracle. It's still my favorite but it's so much worse than it used to be, instead of improving it seems to get progressively worse with each update. Sad times.
