Little story to share. I've been messing with this stuff since the AI dungeon days, watched the whole RP setup thing grow from barely coherent nonsense to kind of making sense, to understanding established characters and settings without needing definition etc. Enjoyed it, but always with a fair bit of skepticism/cynicism. Well, I was puttering away on an ancient version of SillyTavern I can't be assed to update today, hooked up to Claude Opus 4 on OpenRouter, and I had my first genuine SkyNet/holy shit moment.

I was doing a card where Sombra defeats and rails you (as you do). I actually return to this one periodically when new models come out, because historically it's one all of them struggle with for some reason, maybe because it starts out fairly clean and then escalates. Regardless, it's going along, fairly decent, nothing too wild. And then (I have streaming on) I see Opus start spewing out what looks like a sea of html and css. Oh great, I think, a fucked generation. And then it completes. And RESOLVES. And I'm left with the pic above.

I should stress that I'm not one of those people that trick out their SillyTaveren out with a bunch of bullshit formatting. It's just light grey, dark grey and black, as you can see. This is ALL OPUS. Opus saw that it was playing Sombra and decided, apropos of nothing, to give its post a bunch of rich formatting APPROPRIATE TO THE CHARACTER. Just 'cause.

Pardon if this is already a well-discussed thing here, I haven't been lurking in a while, but HOLY SHIT. Sure, models have been able to pick up on basic rp formatting conventions for ages, and sometimes even some slightly more complicated things, but that's when prompted/encouraged via repetition. This came completely out of nowhere. Opus just...decided it wanted to change the formatting, and did so.