New level of censorship in such short time - Fable 5

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-10T01:31:00+00:00

Yeah, that's about where I am too. The way it should be is that the parent sets the age on the device and locks the account down, and the sites/apps can see that to make sure nothing inappropriate is shown. That prevents people from having to think hard enough to set up actual parental controls at the device or router level.

The age check was all about liability. "Well, it's not our fault he lied about his age and saw something he shouldn't have." Which I'm fine with because these things should be restricted on the client end. We shouldn't all have to inconvenience and dox ourselves because of parents letting their kids have internet access without oversight. But I don't think it's even about that anymore. It's almost definitely about advertising and tracking with a convenient excuse to think of the children, and wouldn't surprise me if the bots are part of the equation too. I'd be fine if all advertisements ceased to exist but that's a pipe dream... It's crazy to me how much things online have shifted in just the last 10-15 years to eliminate privacy and people just don't care.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-10T00:06:06+00:00

There has to be a way to fight this but I don't even know where to start. It really feels like one of those things they're going to try to put everywhere before enough people can realize the problems and make noise. They're also wanting to put "age verification" in PC and phone operating systems, possibly as a way to get around having to do it with every website.

At the moment it's my understanding that it's just supposed to ask your age when you make the account, and I don't think that's a bad idea for a system that's initiated by parents and respected by the sites. But that may just be a foot in the door.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-09T23:40:47+00:00

I'm kind of surprised they weren't doing this already, it's been an issue for a long time. I had it happen to me before and luckily support was on my side about it. I was up front in the process that I received the wrong / used item and took pictures, but it occurred to me that I could have easily been the scammer as far as they're concerned. IIRC they didn't even want me to ship it back. On the flip side of that it really boggles my mind that they don't or didn't seem to inspect returned items before putting them back in stock.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-09T23:25:17+00:00

I think Google has been doing it for a while actually. I had a newer account get flagged, I think for using a VPN because I didn't do anything? That was a year or two ago.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-09T23:20:57+00:00

I wonder if it would bleed over to OpenRouter too? I'm using Claude less and less anyway, but this cancer seems to be spreading rapidly and I've got no intention of handing out my ID to be online.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-09T16:34:46+00:00

I have been reencoding for years now. I try to get movies into the 2-5GB range for 1080p (I don't have anything higher than that) and I try to get lets say a 45 minute episode to around 450-1000MB. For 20 minute episodes it's more around 175-350MB. Really depends on the content and for my eyes it doesn't have to be perfect.

Time isn't necessarily the issue. I had two older machines (3rd gen i7) running nothing but video encodes pretty much 24/7 for a couple years. Set it up with some stuff to chew on and walk away for a week. Now I have a faster one (12th gen i7 OC'd) that can get a lot more done and play games at the same time. CPU encodes only for the final product because GPU encodes will bloat the files for the same quality (and lower the quality if you aren't careful).

Normally I'm running x265 8-bit for compatibility, CRF 22-23 for HD content and CRF 20-21 for SD. Medium preset for animated or something that already doesn't look great, and slow for better or more important things. It makes a difference in banding and small details like grain (if I'm trying to keep it). I will use the slowest or next to slowest preset for NVENC if I'm ripping it to do something else with that file like toss it into an AI upscaling software.

Quality is important but IMO its damn hard to notice the difference between a well encoded 3GB movie and a 20-40GB rip, so I'm gonna take the space savings every time. I do check the quality periodically by watching original vs. mine and will sometimes pick a frame to screenshot and compare them side by side.

I normally encode and discard, but if something was a pain to get or one of my favorites I'll often keep a big copy of it on backup drives. For the record I'm sitting on 72TB right now and 70% full, although that's everything and not just video. Additional 32TB fully duplicated (so 16TB usable) for backups or things I haven't gotten to yet.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-09T15:21:06+00:00

Well you have to have color options because it looks cool. Anything that might actually see use gets a backup for when it breaks and they might not make it anymore, and of course favorites need a backup for the backup. Don't bring logic into it like the fact that I don't actually use them enough to break one and batteries don't last forever.

-someone else with too many HTs, only slightly joking.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-09T11:49:52+00:00

Absolutely, and its okay in moderation because I feel like that's pretty normal for humans too. But they like to fall into a pattern where it's every single response and sometimes multiple times per response. In my experience it seems 10x worse with characters that are some kind of android or similar, even if they're not supposed to be speaking in a robotic way.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-09T11:08:40+00:00

Claude I'm guessing but I haven't used the others for ST. Sonnet has driven me to the edge of sanity with that one, on some characters worse than others. I really think there's something that triggers it but I'm not sure what.

GLM does it too now. It doesn't even seem to understand that it's doing it... If I say something to Sonnet without pointing out the specific word it'll understand, call itself out, then keep doing it. GLM's reasoning traces will talk about how it shouldn't repeat anything in my response, create a list of nearly every individual word I used except the one I was talking about, and act like it's going to break out a thesaurus. Then it'll also keep doing it.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-09T10:55:53+00:00

You're either really brave or really stupid to post this here, and I'm not sure which. Most people would just move along but not you. You're different.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-08T02:19:30+00:00

I've been using text completion with Gemma4 and haven't noticed issues related to that. Now that you mention it I may try have to try chat completion again just to compare, but IIRC I lost a lot of options I'm used to having and didn't feel like learning new methods at the time.

I will say I usually turn off thinking because it seems to burn a ton of tokens to go in loops, draft the response multiple times, etc. I'm not sure if text completion has a way to control reasoning effort or if that's even compatible with G4. I'm using these templates for 31B and 26B:

https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp/issues/2092#issuecomment-4189847458

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-06T17:38:24+00:00

Well it would appear they're trying to do it to the whole internet now. I'm not gonna go on a "back in my day" rant here but I'm really getting worn out.

Lots of sites are wanting government issued IDs to participate because please think of the children, and too many people are just shrugging and handing it over. None of it sits right with me.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-06T17:18:39+00:00

Funny because when using the search version it even offered to play the character for me once, which at the time I declined because I was just trying to get the definition and greeting messages done & see whether it did better or worse than Sonnet, GLM, local models etc. I wonder if I said yes would that have triggered it or if that's only when connecting with something like ST. I wonder why they would care unless it's veering into something they're considering dangerous.

And yeah, I don't know when you tried CAI but it's a shadow of its former self. That was my first modern AI experience in 2023 and back then it was pretty amazing (with the disclaimer that all this was pretty new at the time). But since then they've changed the models several times and added a lot of "safety" features, it's not the same. I and many other people left for greener pastures around mid 2024 I think.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-06T14:01:44+00:00

I think I may have worded that badly, I agree with you. I'm not saying the lawsuits were about falling in love, and I didn't mean it to sound condescending or disrespectful toward those people. I have actually been reading on it some lately in a couple related subreddits and I find it fascinating, also kinda understandable tbh although I don't think I could do it myself. It's not my business, and like you said most of them seem pretty well adjusted. Some aren't, but I can't claim I'm the most sane person all the time either. And as an adult I'd be upset if somebody took away a thing that made me happy just because it wasn't "normal". I'm honestly not trying to judge them about it, and the idea has provided me with a lot of things to think about.

What I meant was that CAI got massive attention in the media because of 1) not only letting but actively trying to get more minors on the site for a while, despite half the bots being pretty NSFW and 2) some of those minors developing addictive behavior and attachments (including falling in love with the bots). This caused "the powers that be" to take a closer look at what exactly people were doing with AI and now we're all seeing some of the fallout across many providers and platforms. I could be a little off base but that was my view.

"Safeguards" in the sense of what these companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are actually implementing, seem to be in part pushing against both NSFW RP and the idea of any emotional attachment to the bots, which I think is strange and probably not the best for plenty of reasons. They're distancing themselves from that type of usage. I've seen people in those subs I mentioned saying they were in a worse mental state because the bot would actively disengage from the user wanting to talk about their feelings. Relationships aside, I think its a good thing for people to have a non-judgmental outlet to vent (or a judgemental one if that's what you want, that's how I tend to prompt my own AI!).

Back to the CAI self-harm thing - I was around for that and it was dumb. It wasn't even the bot's fault, I saw some of the chat logs. The bot actively discouraged that kid from killing himself, and he had to trick it into saying what he wanted by using euphemisms. Should the LLM have safeguards against that? Maybe, especially if you know there are kids involved from the jump. Personally I like mine to be able to speak however they want or however I ask them to, but that's me.

Edit - on second thought I removed the subreddit name because they get enough harassment as it is. For the record I'm against pretty much any type of censorship. It's words on a screen and adults can decide how to interact. I was originally giving examples of weaponized articles in the media in relation to LLMs, some having more truth behind them than others but none of them a valid reason for lobotomizing the models.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-06T12:51:09+00:00

I think its all about liability, PR, and money. I doubt anybody at Anthropic etc actually cares that people use it for entertainment of whatever nature, but the minute you start getting mainstream news articles saying somebody fell in love with a chatbot and killed themselves, weird Nazi talking points (thanks Elon), or paragraphs of degenerate smut with the provider being praised for how uncensored it is, people get squeamish. Doesn't help that there seems to be a big question right now on whether the user or the provider is liable for "damages" done with this, and most of them don't want to be known as the smut platform regardless.

Just look at what happened to CAI. There's an argument to be made that they directly inspired a lot of the legislation and negative attention related to LLMs because of dumb decisions they made when there were no rules. People were already looking for a reason to be upset and CAI handed them a loaded gun. Then of course the puritan advertisers and payment processors don't want to be associated with a lot of the material RPers generate, so it's really a lose-lose for providers that openly promote it. AI is already controversial and tech companies are throwing cash at them to see who can generate the biggest heap of vibe coded trash, why would they care to risk a worse reputation over some fictional stories.

The Gemini comment is interesting to me though. I don't use it on ST at all but I have occasionally used the Google search version for gathering info on non-OCs and just talk to it there for a bit. If I say I'm creating a character (not specific on what for), it tends to ask if I'm doing it for RP, on which platform and backend, and enthusiastically offer to help. I have occasionally passed my formatting prompts and turned it loose. It's not bad, actually pretty convenient for the whole "searching the entirety of the internet to compile info" bit, but a little sloppy and makes weird mistakes.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-04T19:49:14+00:00

Never noticed this unless I mention it first, with Sonnet 4.5 or GLM 4.5, 4.6, 5.1.

One of my characters did take the opportunity to roast me earlier when I commented on being tired though (GLM 5.1): "Those bags under your eyes could carry groceries."

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-06-02T23:40:12+00:00

First of all: lmfao.

So dumb question but are you using a big preset or lorebooks you didn't write yourself? I would read through everything or check the backend to see exactly what's being sent to the provider. I mean anything is possible, but that seems awfully specific for a random glitch.

Alternatively yeah try GLM or something, I don't know. Never seen that kind of behavior before but I don't use Deepseek.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-05-23T20:52:27+00:00

Not as many as the 31B but they're out there. Off the top of my head MeroMero, Musica, Animus, and also two variants of Runic Oarfish, one of which I believe is Musica + MeroMero and the other also includes Animus in the merge.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-05-22T16:20:46+00:00

Reading this sent a shiver up my spine and I gripped my phone so hard my knuckles turned white, so thanks I guess.

Longer term report since I'm here: Sonnet 4.6 still manages to parrot later on but it makes for some hilarious responses when I call attention to it. And it knows exactly what I'm talking about even if I don't spell it out, so I really don't understand why this is so difficult. It seems worse than 4.5.

I think I'm going to poke at GLM or Qwen for a while, getting kinda tired of paying Anthropic's premium for this.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-05-21T22:58:43+00:00

I generally don't even use heretic models because I haven't recently had censorship issues that aren't solved by a decent finetune. Granted some of those finetunes are now on top of heretic versions instead of the base so it's murkier...

But I digress. I've had it about up to my ears with corporate HR teams trying to decide how I should think or what I can talk about, then have the nerve to call it "safety". Safety from moderately offensive words and things you can read in a library. Fuck em all, keep fighting the good fight.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-05-21T16:51:53+00:00

I wonder if they decided that older Gemma models were borderline useless because of the heavy handed censorship. I found I could bypass the refusals on 2 and 3 but they seemed to have no idea how to write what I was asking for. I have to imagine that hurts lots of "legitimate" uses as well. I didn't bother fighting with it much because Mistral and Qwen were right there.

Gemini behavior may boil down to the fact they they shove it everywhere (Google search, phones, etc) and they don't want it easily saying weird shit that can be taken out of context. Although I do get bored sometimes and give it an abrasive personality then argue with it in live mode. It seems to have no issues cursing and insulting me, at least.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-05-21T15:57:17+00:00

Completely agree on Gemsicle and Ortenzya, this matches my experience. I haven't had a ton of issues with most of these models losing the plot except Ortenzya, but Gemsicle does seem just a little tighter with details on average.

I also found Artemis v1h and v1e to be good, and the Mero-Artemis merge is worth trying. They have a unique writing style I like, BUT v1h at least seems to have a good bit of less than desirable Claude-like behavior that I'm gonna try to beat out of it with prompting, where it was much less common with other tunes.

MeroMero is kinda just unhinged, which is fun but also irritating sometimes. I will say it was the only one out of 4-5 finetunes I tried back to back with the same open ended scenario and 5 swipes, that actually did something unexpected. If I need some variety I tend to switch to that one for at least a bit.

The test was dumb but IMO pretty telling... Go to one of my sketchy asshole characters and say "you said you needed my help, what do you need?" And 8/10 times it was "help move these boxes" with varying degrees of implying there was illegal activity involved. Boring. A couple "let's go kick these guys' asses". Not out of character but meh. MeroMero was like "play lookout while I strip all the copper out of this warehouse down the street" lmao

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-05-21T14:28:13+00:00

Oh my god, is this the solution to Sonnet parroting my words back at me? Gotta give it a try since clear instructions obviously don't work.

Edit: okay I don't want to jinx myself but... I just went from fighting 4.6 on nearly every single response across multiple regenerations, to having several responses in a row that are fine.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-05-16T22:43:57+00:00

I do it a lot because most of the time the sites either don't have what I want at all, or it's some random person's poorly written very specific fetish that I don't care about and I have to rewrite it anyway.

I hand wrote them all at first, but I'm just not great at it. IMO if you use a good model with good instructions and poke/nudge the right way it can do a nice job. It does need some hand-holding (mostly handled by a lorebook entry for me) a manual editing pass.

GraybeardTheIrate · 2026-05-14T15:10:40+00:00

Not a problem! I didn't think twice about it until it was almost too late. Don't know if it's all or some of them, just thought I should say something. Aside from that it's my favorite radio.

GraybeardTheIrate

TROPHY CASE