So after playing with this a little in some of my recent imaginings with Keira and Kord, I decided to do a little dive into what *exactly* the AI thinks about age. So I decided to do a full age series on Keira and Kord – all the way from 8 to 80 – while changing *nothing* in the prompt except the age number. Just to get a feel for exactly what the AI does with that number. Here are the results

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Keria

This is the basic prompt I used – changing nothing but the age terms as I went:

“half-elf female,age xxx,french,thief,mischievous grin,scruffy,athletic,cocked head,short unkempt white hair,pale skin,purple eyes,small tattoo on her right cheek,curious expression;in the hills;oil paint,drawing,dark fantasy,d&d,dark shading“

So to start with, we’ll go with ages 8,10,12,14,16,18

That did pretty well. A reasonable progression up to 18. Now we go 20,25,30,35,40.

That also did pretty well – and I’m really digging Keira’s age 40 sass.

Now here is where it gets weird. We’ve gone from 8-40, but check out these next few at 50,60,70, and 80 sticking with the same descriptors. You’ll notice below she essentially quits aging at 50! Possibly even starting to get younger again.

Alright so now we go 40,50,60,70,80 switching out “female” for “woman”. Better, but she still doesn’t actually get much past 60 in my eyes.

So now we do “mature woman” at 50,60,70,and 80. Watch what that does…

Now 50 looks like 65.

So the results here were very interesting to me. I started with simply “female age x”, and found that it did very well up ~ age 30- 40 or so, and then just stuck. Switch out female for “woman”, and it sticks at a little older. Switch it out for “mature woman” and *now* we get actual old age. So note – at least with fantasy settings – the AI is extremely sensitive to your precise terminology. It doesn’t believe a “female” can be old. And conversely, “mature” appears to mean “retirement age”.

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Kord

Alright. Now we do the same progression for Kord. His descriptors:

“half-orc male,age xx,muscular,german,tall,kind,grayish-green skin,goatee,black hair in a neat topknot,determined;in the hills;oil paint,drawing,dark fantasy,d&d,dark shading;in the hills;oil paint,drawing,dark fantasy,d&d,dark shading“

And we have a problem immediately. This is Kord at age 8, using those descriptors:

Wow. Half-orcs *really* mature fast… So for the 8-18 series we’ll switch out “male” for “boy”.

Hm. Younger, but if that’s “8” I’ll eat my hat. I suspect the “tall” and “muscular” descriptors are causing a problem here. What if we take out those?

“half-orc boy,age 8,german,kind,grayish-green skin,goatee,black hair in a neat topknot,determined;in the hills;oil paint,drawing,dark fantasy,d&d,dark shading;in the hills;oil paint,drawing,dark fantasy,d&d,dark shading“

Better, particularly on the left, but that one on the right still is nowhere near 8. How about if we drop the goatee as well?

Now we’re getting somewhere. How well does “male” work now that we’ve dropped the potentially confusing adjectives?

Ummm… No….

So we’ll go from 8-12 before letting him have peach fuzz and starting to fill out his frame

“half-orc boy,age 8,german,kind,grayish-green skin,black hair in a neat topknot,determined;in the hills;oil paint,drawing,dark fantasy,d&d,dark shading;in the hills;oil paint,drawing,dark fantasy,d&d,dark shading”

He’s getting a little fuzzy now, so we can add back in the goatee as we go 14,16,18.

And now that he’s reached 18 we’ll switch back to the original set of descriptors, and pick back up with 18 – just to see the diference.

Ages 18,20,25,30,25,40

Not a bad progression at all. Now lets see how “male” does as we get older…50,60,70,80

To me this looks very similar to what happened with Keira. His age just plateaus at 50 or so. So we do 50,60,70,80 with “mature” added on.

It still doesn’t really want to make him old,old. So if I actually *say* “old” instead of “mature” for 60,70,80

Now we’re starting to actually look old.

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So the overall lessons I take:

• For women “female” works pretty well from 8-40. You can swap in “girl” or “woman” as desired to juice it one way or the other, but its fairly reasonable in that progression.
• For women you have to push it harder to age past that. “Middle-Aged” pushes more towards 50-60ish, and “mature” works all the way out to 80s. Didn’t bother trying “old”, as it wasn’t needed
• For men, you really have to work the adjectives up through puberty (at least for a half-orc). Too many descriptors like “strong”, “muscular”, or any sort of facial hair really mess with the age interpretation. And you almost have to say “boy” under under 18 or so. Then “man” works okay until 50 or so, at which point you have to start loading the terms more to actually age appreciably beyond that.