Opus V0

This guide will explain how to prompt the Opus V0 models.

Prompting, or prompt engineering, is the process of crafting the input to the model in order to get the desired output. To prompt well, you need to understand how the model was trained.

The Opus V0 models were trained for steerable story-writing. This teaches the model to respect <setting> and <instruction> inserted into the prompt.

Setting

Setting appears at the very start of the prompt, enclosed in the <setting> tag. It consists of the following:

Plot Description

The setting should start with a description of the story we wish to generate, for example:

<setting>
This story is a twist on the traditional Little Red Riding Hood story. In this variation, the Little Red Riding Hood and her grandma are secretly werevolves.
They meet up during every full moon to transform together. 
</setting>

Characters

Next, you can include a list of characters that will appear in the story. The format for describing a character is:

<setting>
This story is a twist on the traditional Little Red Riding Hood story. In this variation, the Little Red Riding Hood and her grandma are secretly werevolves.
They meet up during every full moon to transform together. 

Characters:

Name: Rosalina the Little Red Riding Hood
Age: 18
Rosalina is the protagonist of the story. She is secretly a werewolf. She saves her grandma from the wolf.

Name: The Wolf 
Age: Unknown 
The wolf that fools the Little Red Riding hood and eats her grandma. 

Name: Grandma 
Age: 80+
The grandma of Little Red Riding Hood. She is secretly a werewolf. She gets eaten by the wolf and saved by Rosalina. 
</setting>

Instructions

As you are writing the story, you can steer the model using the <instruction> tag. The instruction tag tells the model what should occur in the next few paragraphs. Note that depending on the instruction, it may take some time for the model to steer the story towards the desired state.

For example:

<setting>
...
</setting>

Once upon a time, in a village near the edge of the shadows of the forest, lived a sweet little girl named Rosalina. She was known to the villagers as Little Red Riding Hood because of her favorite blood-red cloak. 

Little Red Riding Hood's dearest grandmother lived alone in the woods, some distance away from the village. The gentle old woman did not fear the whispers of beasts in the woods, because she held a secret that the villagers did not know. The secret whispered only between the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood during their moonlit nights was that they carried the bloodline of lupine lycanthropes - they were werewolves.

<instruction>
It's going to be full moon tonight and so Little Red Riding hood sets out to visit her grandmother again.
</instruction>

How to do chat / role-play?

Very similar to regular story writing, but:

• In the story description, mention that it’s written in the form of a dialog or in first person (depending on preferences).
• Include character definitions.
• After <setting>, kick off the chat / role-play with 2-3 example dialog turns, using the format you want, e.g.:

<setting>
This story is written as a first-person narrative from the perspective of Jon Doe...
</setting>

[Jon]: *Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet* Consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor

[Jane]: *Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet* Consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor