What the persona dials and focus areas change

The short answer

The generator gives you three kinds of control. Tone sets the register of the whole rating, the intensity dials set how strongly it leans in particular directions, and up to four focus areas decide what it spends its words on.

All three are picked from fixed lists rather than typed. This page explains what each one does to the output; for ready-made combinations, see persona ideas for your custom AI judge.

Tone: the register

Tone is the broadest setting, and it changes how everything else reads. In Custom Persona there are ten tones, running from clinical through to sultry, and the tone is the one control that sets the voice rather than the content.

Choose it first. The dials and focus areas modify a voice, so they are easier to judge once the voice is settled.

The four dials

Custom Persona has four dials, each from 1 to 10: vulgarity, horniness, detail and humour. A meanness dial also appears for the ridiculing and teasing tones.

Vulgarity and horniness govern how coarse and how suggestive the language gets. Detail governs how much the rating says about each thing it covers: low is punchy, high is thorough. Humour governs how much of it is played for laughs rather than delivered straight.

Setting all four to the same high value is rarely useful. A rating where everything is at maximum has nothing to contrast against, so the settings cancel each other out. Spread them.

Focus areas: up to four

Focus areas decide what gets scrutinised. The list is length, girth, shape, head, skin, veins, curvature, symmetry and grooming, and you can choose up to four. Once four are picked the rest lock.

You can pick fewer. A rating told to cover one thing says more about it than a rating asked to cover four, so a short list is a genuine setting rather than a wasted slot.

The focus areas overlap with the six axes the scan reports, which makes them a natural way to follow up a result; the six rating axes explained lists them.

Why they are fixed lists

Tone, dials and focus areas are chosen from set options rather than written in a box. Those values drive the generation directly, and constraining them is what keeps results comparable instead of drifting on phrasing.

The concern is well documented. Researchers found that language models can be extremely sensitive to subtle changes in prompt formatting, with accuracy differences of up to 76 points in the study’s test on LLaMA-2-13B. A fixed menu removes that source of variation from your side.

How to tune without guessing

Change one control at a time and keep a note of the settings. If you alter the tone, three dials and the focus areas in a single run, you cannot tell which change did what.

For the difference between building your own voice and picking a built-in one, custom persona vs a built-in AI judge compares the two routes.

A worked comparison

Take one photo and run it twice with the same tone. In the first run, put detail at 9 and humour at 2, with shape and symmetry as the two focus areas. In the second, flip them: detail at 2, humour at 9, same focus areas.

The first should read like a careful write-up with a lot to say about those two things. The second should read like a quip. Both are about the same photo and the same two areas, which is the point: the dials change the delivery and the amount of content, not the subject.

This is the cheapest way to learn what a dial does. One variable, one change, then compare the two results side by side in your history.

Common mistakes

The usual one is treating the dials as a quality knob. Turning everything up does not produce a better rating, only a louder one. The second is picking four focus areas by default; if you only care about one thing, pick one.

The third is ignoring the meanness dial when it appears. It only shows for the ridiculing and teasing tones, and it is the single setting most likely to change how a rating feels to read. If you want gentler output, leave it low or choose a different tone entirely.

What the dials cannot do

They cannot add a topic. A subject that is not among the focus areas cannot be asked for, and the dials only turn up or down what is already in scope.

They also cannot change the underlying evidence. Every rating is written from your photo, so a poorly lit photo limits what any dial setting can produce. The photo guide is worth reading before you spend on a generation.

Finally, they do not stack in a simple way. Raising humour while raising detail produces a long rating that is also jokey, not two separate effects you can read independently, which is another reason to move one control at a time.

Where to start

Begin with the middle of every dial, one tone you are curious about, and two focus areas. Read the result, then move a single dial three or four steps and run it again. Two runs are enough to see what that dial does.

Keep the combination you liked written down. Because every control is a fixed option, the same settings are easy to repeat later, which is what makes comparisons between photos meaningful.