How to save your Character.AI chats before you leave

What is worth saving

Character.AI is a popular site for chatting with user-made AI characters, and a long story there can hold months of scenes. Not all of it needs keeping. Before you start copying, decide what you actually want to bring:

• The character's greeting and definition, if you made the character.
• The turning points: the first meeting, the confession, the betrayal, the promise.
• Names, places and running jokes that only exist in this story.
• The last twenty or thirty messages word for word, as a sample of how the character talks right now.
• The character's picture, if it is yours.

Copying a conversation by hand

These steps use ordinary browser features, so they work wherever you can open the chat in a web browser:

• Open the chat on a computer if you can. Selecting long text on a phone is slow.
• Scroll up to the oldest message you want. Many chat pages only load older messages as you scroll, so keep going until the part you need is on screen.
• Click just before the first message, then shift-click after the last one to select everything between.
• Copy, paste into a plain text file or a document, and put the date and the character's name at the top.
• Open the saved file once to check it really contains what you expect.

Your browser's print option, saved as PDF, or its Save page feature can capture what is currently loaded too, though the result depends on how the page is built. Screenshots are fine for a single favourite scene. If the app offers an official way to download your data, use it as well; a copy of your own is still worth having.

Turning a log into something usable

No model reads a two-thousand-message transcript in one go, so pasting the whole thing into a new chat does not bring the story back. What carries a story across is a short recap plus a list of facts. A fact sheet might look like this:

• Names: Detective Lena Kell (the character), Sam (me), Captain Ruiz (her boss, suspects us).
• Where we are: hiding in the harbour office after the warehouse fire.
• Between us: she knows I lied about the ledger and hasn't forgiven it.
• Open threads: who set the fire; the key taped under her desk.

The recap is four to six sentences on where the last scene left off. Continuing a long roleplay has more on writing one that a model can actually use.

Picking it up on UnsavedAI

Bring the character first: paste its name, greeting and definition at /from-character-ai, as moving a Character.AI character describes. Then send your recap as the first message. When you are signed in, put the fact sheet into Story memory (⋯ menu), so those details stay in view however long the new story runs. A few lines from your saved sample, added to the definition as example dialogue, help the character keep the voice you know.

Keeping copies from now on

Stories on UnsavedAI are saved to your account by default, so you can pick one up on another device. For a file of your own, Download this story (⋯ menu) saves the whole conversation as Markdown, with each line labelled by speaker. Doing that at the end of each big chapter means you never have to scroll and select again. How to make AI remember your story covers keeping a long story coherent once it is running.

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