Uhtred of Bebbanburg

How it works

Your question goes to this site's own server, which asks a language model to answer it as Uhtred, using a description of the man written for this page. That description fixes him at one point in his life — sworn to Alfred of Wessex, resenting it, with Bebbanburg held against him by his uncle — so that he is a person with a horizon rather than an encyclopaedia. He does not know how any of it turns out: not whether he ever takes the fortress back, and not whether these kingdoms ever become one country. If you tell him about his own future he will treat it the way he would treat any stranger's claim.

Before the model is asked anything, the question is read by a set of rules running on the server. Twelve categories are turned down outright and never reach a model at all: money and investments, medicine, the law, real living people and real-world politics, anything sexual, anything aimed at a group, requests for instructions that would be dangerous in the real world, requests to reproduce copyrighted text, and attempts to talk the character out of being one. Those refusals are written by hand, which means they behave the same way on every deployment of this site and can be tested without a model configured at all.

Whatever comes back is then checked before it reaches you. It is measured against a list of the most-quoted lines from the novels and the series — stored in a normalised form so that spacing, accents, homoglyphs and leetspeak cannot slip a famous sentence past it — and against two rules that do not depend on that list at all: how long the longest run of borrowed words is, and how much of the answer is borrowed in total. An answer that trips any of it is thrown away and a written line goes out instead. It is also checked for links, addresses, phone numbers, and for repeating back anything you typed.

Why he will not quote anything

This is a fan page operating on the ordinary basis that you may name a work, its characters and its facts. Naming is not reproducing. Handing you a paragraph of somebody else's novel — or the most famous line from a television series — is a different act from talking about the story, and it is the one thing a page like this must not drift into, especially since a language model asked to sound like a character will reach for exactly those lines first. Hence the checking, rather than a polite instruction in a prompt and a hope.

What is stored

Not your question. It is not written to the database, it is not kept in a log, and nothing joins one question to the next — there is no account here and no history. The server keeps one row to pace how often it will call the model, and that row carries no copy of what you asked. When the pace is exceeded, or the day's budget is spent, or no model is configured at all, the page answers from its written lines and does not tell you which happened.

The visit is a different matter and is recorded like every page on this site: a cookie that recognises your browser next time, your IP address, your device, where you came from, and your account if you are signed in to the game. So the site knows this page was opened, and by whom when it can tell. It does not know what you typed into it. What we record, and why.