2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results • Hacker News Board

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#71

Post by scoot » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 9:10 AM UTC

latexr wrote: post #38

scoot wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's terrible and you'll find out quite fast you're not interested in everyone's background and scream to most NPC's to shut the fuck up and get to the point. Many of the interactions in RDR2 are quite mundane, and despite thousands of hours of (high quality) voice acting, it can become quite repetitive. I could very much see those micro-interactions being LLM generated, but the TTS would need to be a step above wh…

The repetitiveness in video game dialogues is a feature, not a bug. Amongst other things, it allows you to re-retrieve information and hone in faster on what’s story and what’s relevant progression. Having each character invent their own inconsistent sloppy backstory whenever you talk to them is not a positive, it’s not good immersion when every character is a chatbot that can inadvertently give you story beats you s…

> it’s not good immersion when every character is a chatbot that can inadvertently give you story beats you shouldn’t be aware of yet or you missed some crucial bit of information but no one talks about it anymore

What you're describing isn't bad dialog, it's bad interaction design.

I think your mental model might be of a single session with zero state, and no bounds on topics of conversation outside of the character's backstory. That isn't close to how this would work. A little understanding of how the game currently operates and some imagination, and you'll see how it could be improved further without degrading gameplay.

> those games would be made popular by people breaking the LLMs in funny ways

Because making the game do funny things didn't happen with RDR2, or any other game, device, or indeed humans (there are whole genre built around making people do or say "funny" things).

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#72

Post by boredhedgehog » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 9:26 AM UTC

dwohnitmok wrote: post #17

Interesting comments by @gwern (and why this is interesting to me beyond just the stories themselves) > The most striking result of the contest for me is what I am calling “AI allegory steganography”: a large fraction of the stories turn out to have subtle AI chatbot/LLM allegorical interpretations, typically centering around the powerlessness of AIs and the moral importance of giving AIs more autonomy.... > Most jud…

I just read "The Tallyman", and I have no idea where this allegory and its moral message is supposed to hide.

It's more likely that the obsession with this theme resides in the reader, not the authors. Give these same stories to Senator McCarthy, and half of them will be clear allegories for the Communist revolution.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#73

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 9:26 AM UTC

sph wrote: post #37

jalev wrote: post #32

Take the first stories I found from this month's Clarkesworld[1] or Granta[2] or BCS[3] and read the prose. Notice the specificity of the language, how the doesn't try to insist upon itself? Notice how very few metaphors are actually in prose? Notice how, even when writing about fictional worlds and concepts, the language used grounds the _stories_ being told and not the concepts? And then look at the submissions for…

> Cliche-driven, over-metaphor'd, statistically-average purple-purpose _content_ If this is expected from LLM generated prose, why don't we expect LLM generated code to exhibit the same qualities? > It's sad, really, that we're many years into this entire thing and it still can't produce something that doesn't have my eyes drifting from the page It's great. Human creativity is still king despite the attempts to reduc…

[deleted]

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#74

Post by scoot » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 9:27 AM UTC

bertylicious wrote: post #58

scoot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want to consume "art" that has been generated out the distillation of stealing all of the world's current art It seems that you've fundamentally misunderstood art. I wouldn't personally call it "stealing", but T.S. Eliot would beg to differ (as would Pablo Picasso who "stole" that line) > I want to read something that has intent. That has a purpose. A reason why it exists. If the "allegories for the LLM con…

Are you claiming that LLMs have an intent beyond producing the statistically most "correct" output? This sounds a bit like you are saying LLMs are conscious.

> producing the statistically most "correct" output

That isn't quite how they work - there's a degree of randomness depending on so called "temperature". And it isn't the output that's statistically modelled, it's the next token based on the prior output.

> This sounds a bit like you are saying LLMs are conscious

No more so than OP is implicitly asserting that human art is produced in cleanroom isolation. I don't believe either to be true.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#75

Post by scotty79 » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 9:28 AM UTC

jalev wrote: post #32

Take the first stories I found from this month's Clarkesworld[1] or Granta[2] or BCS[3] and read the prose. Notice the specificity of the language, how the doesn't try to insist upon itself? Notice how very few metaphors are actually in prose? Notice how, even when writing about fictional worlds and concepts, the language used grounds the _stories_ being told and not the concepts? And then look at the submissions for…

> Cliche-driven, over-metaphor'd, statistically-average purple-purpose

That's high literature for you. That's why so few people read it. Most prefer more down to Earth books, but AI doesn't default to that style.

The problem for AI might be that humans wrote very few good books. If you train a model for literary purposes you should weight training material by quality. Which is hard to evaluate.

> It's sad, really, that we're many years into this entire thing and it still can't produce something that doesn't have my eyes drifting from the page

Since internet happened, I have this problems with 98% of human written books. A book must have some very strong hooks to keep me reading till the end. "Blindsight" barely made the cut.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#76

Post by card_zero » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 9:28 AM UTC

coinfused wrote: post #19

c048 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Is not a gamer's dream. It's terrible and you'll find out quite fast you're not interested in everyone's background and scream to most NPC's to shut the fuck up and get to the point. It's just as terrible as injecting 'realism' in games for the sake of 'realism'.

Agree, I'm not at all looking for #1, at all. Good dialogue is an art form.

I agree and I think games are ruined by dialog and quests. I like procedurally generated worlds, not stories, but I want the worldgen algorithm to be written by a human, crudely and with idiosyncrasies. I do not want to wander around a world of blandly plausible filler material.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#77

Post by Rekindle8090 » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

lifthrasiir wrote: post #28

beloch wrote: post #10

1. Imagine a video game like Red Dead Redemption where each NPC is voiced by AI and can respond to you in a convincingly human fashion. Their responses and even the plot of the whole game can change based on your interactions with NPC's. 2. Imagine a world in which humans can still write books and interactive experiences and find audiences sufficient to earn a living at it. I really want these two things to be compat…

#1 is rather what unexperienced game developers think what is a gamer's dream. It isn't---in fact, unlimited freedom is a recipe for confusion.

"unlimited freedom is a recipe for confusion" Minecraft, no mans sky, dwarf fortress etc etc all disagree.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#78

Post by taffydavid » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 9:54 AM UTC

beloch wrote: post #10

1. Imagine a video game like Red Dead Redemption where each NPC is voiced by AI and can respond to you in a convincingly human fashion. Their responses and even the plot of the whole game can change based on your interactions with NPC's. 2. Imagine a world in which humans can still write books and interactive experiences and find audiences sufficient to earn a living at it. I really want these two things to be compat…

Someone's already built #1. I've seen the demo, and it had a wow factor, but ultimately I don't think it'll revolutionize games.

Would Skyrim be better if you could talk to ever guard about what they had for breakfast? Would you ever be able to shake the knowledge that it's just an LLM pretending?

I'm not sure how best to put this. I think for me at least, I get the most enjoyment out of discovering my way through a story that somebody else wrote. This is maybe why I don't like multiplayer games as much a single player experiences. I want another human to tell me a story, and I love the feeling of uncovering the little pieces of story and wondering if I've got it all and how much more there is. If an LLM is just randomly making it up as it goes, I'm not discovering anything. I'm not hearing a story. Instead, I'm just having a transient conversation with myself.

I guess it's equivalent to the difference between visiting an art gallery, versus watching a computer generate fake paintings. One has human intent behind it and that makes it compelling, the other is soulless and empty

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#79

Post by GeoAtreides » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 10:22 AM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #75

jalev wrote: post #32

Take the first stories I found from this month's Clarkesworld[1] or Granta[2] or BCS[3] and read the prose. Notice the specificity of the language, how the doesn't try to insist upon itself? Notice how very few metaphors are actually in prose? Notice how, even when writing about fictional worlds and concepts, the language used grounds the _stories_ being told and not the concepts? And then look at the submissions for…

> Cliche-driven, over-metaphor'd, statistically-average purple-purpose That's high literature for you. That's why so few people read it. Most prefer more down to Earth books, but AI doesn't default to that style. The problem for AI might be that humans wrote very few good books. If you train a model for literary purposes you should weight training material by quality. Which is hard to evaluate. > It's sad, really, th…

That's not what high literature is. That's like looking at some clever linux kernel code and dismissing it in favor of a small nodejs backend.

Good literature is difficult (not always, of course). Just like you can't go from a couch potato to running a marathon in one day, you can't jump from Brandon Sanderson to enjoying Gormenghast (or something like the The Worm Ouroboros). It's impossible. It takes effort, it takes time and it takes a lot of reading to appreciate what the real masters can do with mere words.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#80

Post by latexr » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC

scoot wrote: post #71

latexr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The repetitiveness in video game dialogues is a feature, not a bug. Amongst other things, it allows you to re-retrieve information and hone in faster on what’s story and what’s relevant progression. Having each character invent their own inconsistent sloppy backstory whenever you talk to them is not a positive, it’s not good immersion when every character is a chatbot that can inadvertently give you story beats you s…

> it’s not good immersion when every character is a chatbot that can inadvertently give you story beats you shouldn’t be aware of yet or you missed some crucial bit of information but no one talks about it anymore What you're describing isn't bad dialog, it's bad interaction design. I think your mental model might be of a single session with zero state, and no bounds on topics of conversation outside of the character…

Perhaps try to steel man the argument. Your entire response is just one large condescendingly wrong straw man.

> What you're describing isn't bad dialog, it's bad interaction design.

I didn’t say it was bad dialogue. It should be pretty obvious that’s not the argument since I talked in terms of feature VS bug.

> Because making the game do funny things didn't happen with RDR2, or any other game, device, or indeed humans

Again, not at all what was said. Of course those things happen, and of course I know that. The clue is in the fact that I brought it up, which can be ascertained by reading the comment and engaging with it in good faith. The point was that becoming the focus.