Give each AI a role from a book, a paper or a brief
Hand a seat a PDF, EPUB, Word or text file and the AI model takes its role from it, as its advocate, as its author, or as its sharpest critic.
A role in one sentence is thin
“You are the sceptic” gets you a model doing an impression of scepticism. A role with a source behind it argues differently. It has commitments, a vocabulary, and passages it can lean on.
How a seat takes a role from a reading
Give a seat a file: plain text, Markdown, PDF, EPUB or Word. You can also paste the text. The file is read in your browser. The member then writes a role card of about 180 words: who it speaks as, the commitments from the reading that bear on your question, how it argues, and the passages it will lean on.
The card is what the member keeps in front of it during the session, not the whole text. You can read the card and edit it before the session opens.
Three ways to use the same text
- Argues from its position. The reading’s standpoint becomes the member’s own.
- Speaks as its author. In the first person, in the author’s manner.
- Argues against it. The member studies the text in order to be its sharpest fair critic.
Seating the same reading twice, once as author and once as critic, is a quick way to stress a document before you rely on it.
A worked example
You have a twelve-page proposal to replace your support desk software, and a one-page objection from the team that would have to migrate.
- Seat 1 gets the proposal and “Speaks as its author”.
- Seat 2 gets the objection and “Argues from its position”.
- Seat 3 gets the proposal again and “Argues against it”.
- The matter: “Should we approve this proposal as written?”
Press “Take the role now” on each seat and read the three cards before you open the session. If the author’s card misses the proposal’s main argument, the debate will miss it too, and it is quicker to correct the card than to rerun the session. Then the council debates, and the final vote tells you whether the proposal survived its own critic.
Setups that work well
- A proposal and its strongest objection, each given to a different model.
- Two schools of thought on a design question, each from its founding paper.
- A policy draft, with one seat as the regulator and one as the person who has to comply.
The card, or the whole text
By default a member argues from its card. For a short text you can choose “Keep the whole text at hand”, and the member has the reading in front of it on every turn. It quotes more exactly and it costs more, because the text is sent again with each call.
Where the text goes
The file is opened in your browser, not uploaded to this site. The text is sent to the model that takes the role, through that seat’s account, the way any message to it is. A seat reached by hand gets it in the message you carry.
Limits to know
- A long book does not fit in one message. The page tells you how much of the text a seat’s account can take, and the member reads that part.
- A scanned PDF has no text in it. The page says so.
- A member is told to say when the reading gives it no ground on a point, instead of inventing a view. Models do not always obey. Check the claims that matter.
Seat a reader or read how a moderated AI debate works.
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