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

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#151

Post by pigpop » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 12:16 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #148

pigpop wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Core vim is around 300k lines of C89 code and it's just a text editor. It's over a million lines if you include all the scripting, language features and tests.

Vim has been around for decades, supports a billion architectures and an entire modal editing system plus a scripting language. And it’s in C, not a high level language so verbosity is higher. It’s really not comparable to a glorified frontend to an API.

It turns out things are more complex than they may initially appear.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#152

Post by sometimelurker » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

dag100 wrote: post #149

sometimelurker wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

providers do not want power-seeking LLMs. no one does. this (bad personality) is incentivized during training, especially RL, and is something they would rather not have. tell me, do you think training a power-seeking ASI is a good idea?

> providers do not want power-seeking LLMs Sure they don't. > do you think training a power-seeking ASI is a good idea? Do you really think that the major AI firms think this is a bad idea? I think the whole drama people have around ASI taking over the planet is ridiculous and fantastical and, honestly, a way to distract from the real problems of ASI - that is, creating a rigidly hierarchical world with zero social m…

'X-risk/S-risk' is a superset of 'hierarchical world with zero social mobility' and 'ASI taking over the planet is ridiculous'. x-risk=bad, smart enough power-seeking llms automatically lead to x-risk

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#153

Post by hdjrudni » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 7:25 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #83

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What "context"? If it's coming from the player's input, then the LLM isn't spoiling anything.

e.g. let's say an important character dies in your game but that hasn't happened yet in this point in the story. You're talking to some NPC. That NPC can't possibly spoil that that character is going to die because the developer wouldn't feed that in as context. The NPC doesn't "know" the character is going to die. You, as the player, might be able to convince the NPC that that will happen and it might respond accordingly, but it won't just randomly divulge that by accident.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#154

Post by hdjrudni » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 7:28 PM UTC

td2 wrote: post #150

nkrisc wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Or worse, what if the story of the game was already part of the training data Like a remake of a game

This one is a fair point... if all the characters have distinctive names then NPC can plausibly become aware that it is a character in that game and spoil things. I don't know how to stop that, short of training a clean model from scratch, but that seems a bit much for a game.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#155

Post by mwigdahl » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

gcanyon wrote: post #124

I had an idea for a hard science science fiction short story about five months ago. I had grown tired of Star Trek digging their way out of every problem by throwing techno-babble at it, so I wanted to write something where one scientific leap is made and everything else holds as we understand it. I thought to experiment with having an LLM help me write it. I wrote a bullet-point outline and had the LLM revise it --…

I'm reading your story now -- it's great space adventure! Congratulations!

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#156

Post by yreg » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 7:46 PM UTC

rpdillon wrote: post #120

yreg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, the laziness of detractors in their language around "slop" frustrates me. It amounts to a constant stream of shallow dismissals.

I feel exactly the same. Can I follow what you are working on (in regards the AI-assisted writing) somewhere?

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#157

Post by gcanyon » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 4:41 AM UTC

mwigdahl wrote: post #155

gcanyon wrote: post #124

I had an idea for a hard science science fiction short story about five months ago. I had grown tired of Star Trek digging their way out of every problem by throwing techno-babble at it, so I wanted to write something where one scientific leap is made and everything else holds as we understand it. I thought to experiment with having an LLM help me write it. I wrote a bullet-point outline and had the LLM revise it --…

I'm reading your story now -- it's great space adventure! Congratulations!

Thanks! If you have any thoughts or suggestions I'm all ears.