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2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

hyperstitionai.com

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Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#81

Post by max-ch »

networked wrote: post #31

I'm D. Bohdan, one of the finalists. Feel free to ask me questions. I have a write-up at https://dbohdan.com/unslop and a repository with my work for the contest at https://github.com/dbohdan/unslop .

Thanks for sharing. I‘ve read your write-up but not yet your story.

1. Honest question: What exactly about this contest and way of writing was enjoyable to you? I‘ve seen your very analytical approach for identifying a premise but then relatively little control about all the rest.

2. I‘ve seen on your website that you also write fiction outside of this particular contest. Can you describe a bit how you use AI there and where you see it as helpful / not helpful for writing fiction?

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#83

Post by nkrisc »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #59
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…

I don't think it can give you story beats you shouldn't be aware of yet. Those beats wouldn't be fed into the prompt until the event happens. LLM can't spit out what it doesn't know. It might indeed fail to reveal something it should but even that i think is unlikely if the harness steers it hard enough. I think it could be fun. If you're always given 4 choices of what you can ask the NPC then your choices can be too…

Why couldn’t an LLM accidentally spit out story beats if they plausibly follow from the context and the player’s input into the conversation?

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#84

Post by fzeroracer »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #65
solid_fuel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They describe a dystopia and act like it would be heaven if only the processed, distilled slop we have to consume was tasty. As if adding pepper to soylent green will somehow fix everything. There is no need to automate writing. Especially fiction. There are tens of millions of people out there with really interesting and unique ideas and styles who would love to drop everything and write, if only they can get the ch…

Why is it all of the creative works that seem to be getting so much fervor to be automated away? There is plenty of writing that could actually benefit from automation, such as anything involving documentation in technical fields. I know there are a lot of people working on those things too, but it feels like for every technical application, there's 10 creative ones. Is it just because you can't objectively mark crea…

To put it succinctly: It really comes down to jealously. The people generating creative works, whether it's art or writing or games or whatever do so because they are utter voids of creativity. They do so because they believe this machine can even the odds for them, finally show artists how it's done because they have far better ideas than any snobby creative.

And as sardonic as I am I'm also not joking. This is the #1 thing I see consistently show up when you push back on the drivel they're generating. They're upset that there's a perceived wall in front of them that's gatekeeping them from art and they want it destroyed.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#85

Post by scotty79 »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #79
scotty79 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tak…

If something requires effort to value it, is the value in the thing itself? Or is the thing garbage and all the value is in your effort?

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#86

Post by jplusequalt »

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 high literature for you.

What is "high literature"? Have you actually read any of the greats? I have, and while I'm not a fan of everything I've read, I never felt inundated with constant metaphors and overly eloquent prose.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#87

Post by jplusequalt »

networked wrote: post #31

I'm D. Bohdan, one of the finalists. Feel free to ask me questions. I have a write-up at https://dbohdan.com/unslop and a repository with my work for the contest at https://github.com/dbohdan/unslop .

>I have a write-up at

You mean your LLM has a write up?

> repository with my work for the

It's not your work, and you aren't a writer if you use an LLM.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#88

Post by isomorphic_duck »

scotty79 wrote: post #85
GeoAtreides wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tak…

If something requires effort to value it, is the value in the thing itself? Or is the thing garbage and all the value is in your effort?

I didn’t think I would see this take on HN of all places. You can’t appreciate Higher Topos Theory before spending a decade’s worth of effort in pure math - does that make much of Modern Algebraic Geometry “garbage”?

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#89

Post by [deleted] »

nnevatie wrote: post #35
flumpcakes wrote: post #13

I think people are missing the point. The point is not that AI produces slop (it does). The point is that I don't want to consume "art" that has been generated out the distillation of stealing all of the world's current art. That's not original, it's a facsimile of art. I want to read something that has intent. That has a purpose. A reason why it exists. Not just the lowest effort cash grab. This usage of AI is the e…

> distillation of stealing all of the world's current art Here's the age-old dilemma, though - how is reading stealing?

[deleted]

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#90

Post by jplusequalt »

networked wrote: post #53
solid_fuel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried to draw a distinction between the two but honestly, when it comes to art, I cannot. I have seen LLM generated code that I find acceptable, and don't call slop, but art needs a certain level of emotion and shared experience to be compelling. I have never managed to connect to LLM writing, it always comes off as shallow and vapid.

What do you think of https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples as a theory of what makes slop art slop? Summary: > AI slop is unsatisfying because there is no there there. It is intellectual junk food that mimics nutrition but delivers only empty calories. Satisfying AI outputs must embed dense information and compute to actually reward a reader's attention. You inject this value through brute-force search, non-tri…

>AI slop is unsatisfying because there is no there there. It is intellectual junk food that mimics nutrition but delivers only empty calories. Satisfying AI outputs must embed dense information and compute to actually reward a reader's attention. You inject this value through brute-force search, non-trivial prompting, and rigorous curation, ensuring the final result reflects genuine algorithmic effort rather than the zero-shot 'WYSIWYG' default.

I don't agree with this at all. You can prompt all you want, but if you don't have the actual skills to make good art, you won't really know if what you're generating is good or not. This is to say nothing of the "hollow-ness" of outsourcing your voice to generative algorithms.

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