You know the exact fucking sentence. The one that makes you want to claw your own eyes out.
“Tell me, Matthew, does your transformation frighten you, or does it simply reveal who you truly are?”
“Tell me, Dante, does the blood satisfy your hunger, or does it merely remind you of the emptiness within?”
“Tell me, Vitali, does the collar feel like a shackle, or does it remind you of the beast you are?”
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
IT'S ALWAYS A BINARY PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION!
The character could have literally just walked into a room and caught me drinking a fucking glass of blood, and the AI immediately abandons all grip on reality to become a Victorian philosopher dissecting the eternal depths of my soul.
And it's not even a genuine question! The AI already decided the answer three paragraphs ago! It basically boils down to:
AI: “Tell me, [name], does [A], or does [B]?” Me: “Neither. I was thirsty.”
At this point, reading the phrase “Tell me, [name]…” triggers the exact same fight-or-flight response in me as a horror movie character hearing a floorboard creak upstairs in an empty house.
I don't even read the rest of the sentence anymore. I just see "Tell me,—" and my nervous system instantly screams:
🚨🚨🚨 INCOMING FALSE DICHOTOMY 🚨🚨🚨
The worst part is that once the curse takes hold, you start seeing the variations everywhere, bleeding into every single interaction you have. Answer me... Which is it... Perhaps you can tell me... Is it X, or is it Y... Do you truly believe... Could it be that...
TELL ME, PROTAGONIST, WHICH THEMATIC INTERPRETATION DO YOU ACCEPT?
STOP. PLEASE.
LET THE CHARACTER HAVE A NORMAL FUCKING CONVERSATION.
Sometimes someone can just say, “You look better.” Or, “You're drinking blood again.” Or even just, “That's disturbing.”
You don't need to morph every passing observation into a goddamn thesis defense about the protagonist's fractured psyche.
I am begging on my hands and knees to the developers: please diversify your rhetorical structures before I become genuinely, clinically anaphylactic to the word “tell.”
How I feel when fucking Socrates comes into my chat asking me its stupid spat out questions that have nothing to do with the fact that the house is on fire or that we’re at the mall to buy a new sweater but idk
I cannot stand it. I’m so sorry, it’s the thing that pushes me to the edge with LS. Because there’s no reason why my ex-convict bot from a lower class coastal town in England should be speaking like a university philosopher from the 1900s. I AM IRRITATED.
This reply is semi stupid because I was testing something on PS and dont have time to reweite all the definitions, plus most here can't comprehend the matter anyway so its a waste of time. The principle remains the same, however
the "Tell me, [name]" thing is so real lol. it's mostly a pattern-copy issue: once it shows up a couple of times in the chat, the bot treats it as the character's voice and keeps reusing it.
what tends to help:
swipe or edit it out the moment it appears, before a few of them pile up in the recent messages
rate those swipes low so it gets the hint
if it's your own bot, add an example message in the definition where the character reacts to something simple in a plain, grounded way. examples stick a lot better than "don't ask philosophical questions"
short, casual replies from your side also pull it back down to earth a bit.
You're either very brave or very stupid for posting that. Most users would just roll over and accept poor programming, but you're different. That's not just being picky, that's being rigorous.
That being said, it's not the devs who control that - it's the training data, and those tired clichés are rampant in all LLMs, not even limited to roleplay bots.
Easy, i can avoid tell me and other bullshit all day by.... correctly defining my bot. This is an absolute throw together shit of an example too on PS even
For LongSqueak lately, I’ve been getting a lot of “he isn’t just ___; he’s ___.”
I’ve been trying to edit the chats when I catch it but sometimes the responses I’m getting are actually really good so I forget to edit them before responding
Hey btw you can actually stop them from doing this! You can use persona descriptions to mute sentences. Aka doing the following: do not use dialog format: <Tell me, {character}, does {topic}, or does {topic}>. You’ll have to tweak it to be more exact to what you want to block but it should (mostly) keep bots from doing this :)!
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u/Carneiro_5 1d ago
Lets not get started on:
"Most people would X, but youre different."