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

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#101

Post by slfnflctd » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 2:26 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #48

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.

> I have never managed to connect to LLM writing, it always comes off as shallow and vapid. Me too, but I would be careful about being too dismissive, because I would totally bet that at some point the models will be able to write top tier stories. And there will be people who will find those stories soulless purely based on their origin (which is completely fine!) and call them slop (which I feel hurts the language)…

Let's also not forget that humans are more than capable of creating tons of 'slop' far worse than any current SOTA model would create, and I would argue the majority of what people write is in this category.

Models are still improving, and if you can't tell whether one was behind what you're currently reading 100% of the time (which I'm sure you know you can't), the distinction no longer matters except in very specific cases, and you have to go to a lot more effort to uncover that distinction.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#102

Post by lambdaone » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 2:26 PM 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…

I wrote a text-based adventure game engine that implemented quite a detailed world model. The results were very engaging indeed, but after a time I realised that while its game world was hugely detailed to the point of individual characters having their own simulated thoughts, feelings and world view, the game was quite shallow in terms of conceptual depth - it very successfully rehashed genre cliches, but nothing about it felt new or fresh.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#103

Post by slopinthebag » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

solid_fuel wrote: post #55

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frequently steer the AI mid convo though. So much so that I find it useless to share the original prompt. I don't know how best to capture that.

Technically that is only adding to the prompt, which then becomes (your prompt + original response + your prompt 2), etc. You could still capture it by recording only your prompts, the points in the conversation they were submitted at, and the starting parameters for the model. A replay would then produce the same results if your input was added at the same place in the conversation. Granted I don't think the current…

Actually the replay wouldn’t be the same since it’s stochastic, and the more back and fourth you have the more chances for randomness to seep in. One could imagine by the fifth prompt or w/e the responses could have drifted enough that the subsequent prompts don’t make any sense.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#104

Post by cyclopeanutopia » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #84

xboxnolifes wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And the irony is that their generated output is shitty, generic and even repulsive, but they don't know it, because they lack the ability to tell apart the good from the bad.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#105

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

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…

I get it. You want something genuine and original, not a mass-manufactured copy. You want grass-fed beef raised ethically and killed humanely, butchered by an artisanal butcher and cooked by a specialist chef on a charcoal grill, not a weiner stuffed with starch, salt, and fat that goes directly to your pleasure centers and bypasses the whole point of eating food to get nutrition for you mind and body alike.

I get it. We all get it. Except we can't easily ... you know, get it. Anymore. We've industrialised everything. Why not also art and even our thoughts?

I mean termites don't need art, nor do they need individual thoughts but they manage to create marvels of engineering and they have survived for millions of years. Why wouldn't humans go the same way, too, eventually?

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#106

Post by petesergeant » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #50

solid_fuel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be very interested in the harness more than the actually generated story This is a pretty common stance when it comes to LLM generated stuff, actually. The only original part of any LLM generated content is the prompt, everything else is just a derived artifact and doesn't really need to be treated like we would treat original, human-authored work. This same principle is also why many projects reject LLM-ge…

I frequently steer the AI mid convo though. So much so that I find it useless to share the original prompt. I don't know how best to capture that.

I wrote an article that touches on this a few days ago https://sgnt.ai/p/prompt-is-not-the-work/

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#107

Post by rpastuszak » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #11

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #4

so as I understand it from reading through but maybe I have made a mistake, they didn't actually unslop anything, they made slop and the best slop won? If it was to unslop I would expect: 1. Prompts done as in original 2. Stories chosen best of slopped. Then the person who wrote prompt gets to choose someone, not themselves, to take story and "unslop" it. 3. Prizes for prompt. Best unslopped version. Metrics for best…

I feel like 'slop' increasingly means two separate concepts and it tires me a bit. A) AI produced output that is low quality in some jarring aspects B) Any AI output whatsoever regardless of quality

Another meaning that is becoming more common, esp. among gen-z/booktok folks: overly verbose/poorly structured/flat writing. The example being Duma's Count Monte Cristo.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#108

Post by otekengineering » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

anyone have a good argument that steel-mans the anamnesis blog being ai slop?

https://anamnesis.blog

an interesting coincidence is that the blog's july 3 post ties into the wikipedia/odin kerfuffle that's on the front page. its unorthodox take on doubting Thomas suggests we believe "a trustworthy witness without demanding to rerun his experiment yourself". sounds like the blog sides against Jimmy Wales that in our world of agenda-driven primary sources, trustworthy first-hand accounts are the best sources we have. it goes on to doubt all sources other than Him, including itself and yourself, and that's probably not an actionable moderation policy change for wikipedia.

https://katamari64.se/posts/2026/odin-wikipedia/

https://anamnesis.blog/posts/2026-07-03-reach-hither-thy-fin...

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#109

Post by malfist » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

sunrunner wrote: post #94

recursivecaveat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember from moltbook, all AIs ever talk about is AI haha. I don't know if it's intentional or more that the fact that all the models are presumably system-prompted and post-trained to be cognisant of their AI-ness, so it's already in the context. They probably beat them over the head with the idea that chatbots are friendly and helpful and would never hurt a fly trying to align/safety-ify them, so that could lean…

> all AIs ever talk about is AI haha To be fair, that seems to be (almost) all humans talk about now too.

Maybe get out of the tech bubble. Especially if the only conversations you're having are about AI.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#110

Post by lelanthran » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 3:11 PM UTC

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #40

sph wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What might be bad for prose (predictable, boring) might be desirable for code. Maybe that's why LLMs work well for writing things read by computers, but not so much for things read by people.

> Maybe that's why LLMs work well for writing things read by computers, but not so much for things read by people.

They don't really work well for that, though.

The reason you hardly ever hear about it is because the people delivering code via LLMs aren't critically evaluating the code it generates. This is why Claude Code, a text app that is little more than glue between various text-suppliers, is what, 500k SLoC in a high level language?