AI Safety

An AI that plays the role!

Date:

Jan 28, 2025

The Challenge of Making AI Stay in Character

LLMs like GPT are built to be helpful assistants, not actors. They’re designed to give you the best possible answer, not commit to a role. That’s why getting AI to stay in character is like asking a bad actor to convincingly play Hamlet for hours—it just won’t hold up.

Why Prompting Alone Fails

The go-to method for making AI play a character is prompting—telling it how to behave. But prompting is like coaching an amateur actor with a single instruction. It works for a few lines, then the AI forgets and falls back into its default mode: helpful, neutral, and agreeable.

Here’s where prompting breaks down:

  • No emotional depth – Sometimes you need a character to be euphoric, stubborn, or sarcastic, but AI struggles to hold these emotions for long without slipping back to neutrality.

  • Breaks character – After a few exchanges, it loses the role and reverts to generic responses.

  • Lacks conviction – If a character is meant to have strong opinions, the AI often wobbles, softening or contradicting itself.

How We’re Fixing It

To get AI to truly become the character, not just play it badly, we’re using a mix of technical solutions:

1. Fine-Tuning for Personality

Instead of just prompting, we train models on real dialogues, books, and scripts that define the character. This makes them think and speak like the role demands.

2. Memory That Sticks

We build memory systems so the AI doesn’t forget who it’s supposed to be. This includes:

  • Personality tracking – keeping the AI’s behavior consistent over long conversations.

  • Long-term context awareness – ensuring it remembers past interactions.

3. Reinforcement Learning for Character Consistency

We are discussing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with IP holders to ensure AI fully embodies their characters. They will help design and refine AI behavior, making sure it stays true to the intended personality and mannerisms:

  • Human-guided training – Collaborating with creators and rights holders to develop in-character responses that reflect the original vision.

  • Behavior reinforcement – Ensuring the AI maintains its personality through continuous feedback and correction mechanisms.

The Future of AI Storytelling

We’re not just building chatbots—we’re making AI live and breathe its role. The next generation of interactive AI won’t just play characters—it will become them. And that changes everything.