Keep your Character.AI persona when you switch sites

Persona or character: which move is this?

There are two things people bring over from Character.AI, a popular site for chatting with user-made AI characters. The characters you talk to move through the import page, covered in moving a Character.AI character. This page is about the other one: you. Your persona is the name, looks and personality the AI uses when it describes and reacts to your character, and it travels separately.

Copy it, then clean it

Copy the persona text from wherever you wrote it into a plain note first, so you have the original. Personas written over months tend to collect clutter: instructions to the AI, facts from one story, secrets you meant to reveal later. A new site is a good moment to tidy:

Instructions belong in an OOC line or a memory note, story events belong in a recap, and secrets are safer kept out entirely; what metagaming is explains why a character tends to "know" anything written there.

Before and after

A typical persona after a year of use:

"I'm Noor, 24, I have long black hair and I'm really shy but also sarcastic. Always make characters notice my eyes. I'm secretly a princess in hiding. I'm dating Dante and we live in Milan. Please write long replies."

Cleaned up for any story:

"Noor, she/her, mid-twenties. Long black hair usually twisted up with a pencil through it, ink on her fingers. Quiet in a crowd, sharp-tongued one on one. Restores old books for a living. Wants a life that is entirely her own choice. Flaw: she would rather lie than ask for help."

The second version works with a mafia heir, a demon queen or a café owner, and leaves the story room to happen.

Setting it on UnsavedAI

Open any chat, choose About you from the ⋯ menu, and enter the name and description. Characters pick it up from your next message. It is kept in your browser, so if you switch from your phone to a laptop, paste it again there; keeping the note you made earlier makes that a ten-second job.

Your persona should describe you; the story decides your role. For a scene that gives you a specific part, such as being the spouse who arrived from the enemy court with Prince Caelan Vire or the fake fiancée with terms in writing for Lady Isolde Wrenfield, let the scenario supply the role and the persona supply the person. If you want a different role than the scenario gives, Start your own way (⋯ menu) lets you set it before the first message.

The same text works elsewhere

SillyTavern and JanitorAI both have persona fields and both replace {{user}} on a card with your persona's name, so the cleaned-up note you made works there unchanged. If you play the same persona in several places, keep the note as your master copy and paste from it, rather than editing three versions that slowly drift apart. Persona tips has more examples of what to include.

Questions people ask