Pygmalion to Backyard AI Character Conversion

The migration from **Pygmalion** to **Backyard AI** (formerly Faraday) represents a move from the foundational JSON standards of the AI community to a modern, model-orchestration platform. Pygmalion's schema, while pioneering, is relatively flat and lacks the metadata required by today's complex local applications. Our tool acts as a bridge, enriching your legacy characters for modern use.

1. Semantic Schema Alignment

Pygmalion characters typically use keys like char_name, char_persona, and world_scenario. Backyard AI, while flexible, performs best when these are mapped to its specific personality, description, and scenario fields. Our converter identifies these classic keys and performs a "Deep Remap," ensuring that the behavioral instructions intended for Pygmalion models are correctly translated for the wide variety of GGUF and EXL2 models supported within Backyard AI.

2. Optimizing for Modern Context Windows

Legacy Pygmalion files were often authored for smaller models with limited context. Modern local applications like Backyard AI can handle much more detail. During conversion, we sanitize and reformat the data to ensure it utilizes the model's context window efficiently. We prevent the duplication of traits and ensure that dialogue examples are formatted to maximize their influence on the character's speaking style, without wasting valuable tokens on outdated roleplay formatting.

3. Dialogue and Greeting Migration

We map the char_greeting directly to the Backyard first_mes field, while ensuring that example_dialogue is wrapped in the standard {{char}}: "..." pattern. This normalization is critical because different model frontends interpret dialogue cues differently. By standardizing the output, we ensure that your Pygmalion character speaks with the same personality and tone you originally crafted, regardless of the model you select in Backyard.

4. Privacy and the "Zero-Server" Mandate

As with all tools on our platform, this conversion happens entirely in your browser. We understand that your characters represent hundreds of hours of creative writing. By using local JavaScript to handle the JSON transformation, we guarantee that your proprietary data is never transmitted across the open web. This ensures absolute privacy and data sovereignty for the creative community.

5. Identity Integrity and Metadata Generation

Backyard AI benefits from characters that include rich metadata. Our converter generates basic versioning and identity tags during the migration, ensuring that your Pygmalion characters are not just "pasted in" but integrated as high-quality assets in your Backyard AI library. This facilitates better character management and ensures that your legacy creations are ready for the next generation of local AI roleplay.