Saliency Engine

The first thing to know about Saliency Engine is that you won’t find a button or field for it anywhere in Sudowrite. It’s running behind the scenes to help the AI stay focused on what’s relevant.

You may have hundreds of Characters or Worldbuilding Elements in your Story Bible, but it’s rare that all of those will be relevant when you want to generate the prose for a specific beat. Saliency Engine reviews the task at hand, as well as all of the story information you’ve provided, in order to expose the most relevant information to the AI for prose generation purposes.

Saliency Engine will make sense of mountains of story context in an instant, keeping anything you generate on track. That means, for example, if your shifter is in wolf form, the AI won't reference the pleated khakis they might typically wear to work.

Which features does Saliency Engine work with?

Right now Saliency Engine works in three places: your Story Bible, the Write button (when your Story Bible is enabled), and Plugins. In each case, Saliency Engine will do a first pass to identify information relevant to the writing task at hand before passing those details on to the AI in order to generate text.

Do I have any control over Saliency Engine?

Sometimes, you want to keep the AI in the dark about your Characters or Worldbuilding elements. For that, we’ve introduced visibility settings at both the card and trait level.

If you’ve added a character that doesn’t appear until later in your story, and you’d like to make sure the AI ignores that character until then, you can hide them from Sudowrite. Just click the three dots (•••) in the upper right corner of the Character card to toggle the visibility settings of that character to Never.

When visibility is set to Never, Sudowrite’s AI will ignore that card or trait altogether.

Alternatively, lets say you want to include a Motive trait on the Character Card for the murderer in your mystery. Saliency Engine may consider a motive relevant to a scene, leading to an AI generation that spills the beans prematurely. To hide the Motive from Sudowrite’s AI, toggle the visibility setting from within the Motive trait field from Use: Automatically to Never.

Click the Use: Automatically drop down from within the trait field to set that trait’s visibility.

When the icon is set to a struck-through eye, the visbility of a trait is set to Never and Sudowrite will ignore it.

All Character and Worldbuilding cards and traits are visible to the AI by default. That means, unless you say otherwise, Sudowrite’s Saliency Engine will decide whether or not those bits of story context are relevant to the task at hand.

You can toggle the visibility settings as often as necessary.

How does Saliency Engine work with Plugins?

Some plugins are designed to use your Story Bible data. In those cases, Saliency Engine may or may not be used, depending entirely on how the creator built that plugin.

If the creator chose to use the {{ characters }} or {{ worldbuilding }} variables, the Saliency Engine will kick in when necessary.

If the creator chose to use the {{ characters_raw }} or {{ worldbuilding_raw }} variables, the full context of those fields will be passed along into the AI in their entirety. The Saliency Engine will make no attempt to parse the data for relevant context.

Note: In most cases, the raw version will give the AI way more context. This can either degrade or improve the results, depending on both the plugin configuration and the context passed through as a result… but it will almost always make the Plugin use more credits.

Hidden characters or traits will never be visible to the AI, even if a Plugin is using the a raw variable.

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Be Advised: Credit cost is always calculated based on input, output, and the model selected. If a user with hundreds of Characters or Worldbuilding Elements uses a Plugin that includes the raw version of a variable, a great deal of context will be passed through to the AI. This could consume a ton of credits!

All Plugins that predate the Saliency Engine use the standard {{ characters }} variable, and so will use Saliency Engine by default.