Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you take a free mountain lift ride to the top if you happened to come across one during a climbing trip?
would I read the summary of a book expecting the same thing as reading the book? no
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2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
141–150 of 157 posts
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you take a free mountain lift ride to the top if you happened to come across one during a climbing trip?
would I read the summary of a book expecting the same thing as reading the book? no
and if the person who offered you the lift was so obliging to stop at any view you find appealing along the way for how long you desire?
somehow I still think it would be a "no" form you, because it's not really about the views
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#143I'm glad someone did this, but It doesn't surprise me that the models are not up to particularly advanced story writing yet. I could see them writing some rather dry high-concept sci-fi fairly soon, but there are some types of story with interpersonal relationships that I cannot imagine a non sentient writer being able to produce. I wouldn't rule it out an AI being capable in the future, but I think if it did, it wou…
I found LLMs very good at reading human chat logs and doing psychological analysis of the participants, and of the interplay hard to imagine how they do that without a good understanding of emotions/theory of mind if they pattern match to psychology books, that is still functional understanding since they can operationalize them
They definitely have some. They handle the basic test scenarios where multiple people alter some state without the knowlege of the other. Most models seem to handle tracking differing knowledge between entities.
Some of the simple bench tests show how thin that can be.
Things like two lifelong friends had a fight when they were 8 years old because A broke B's favourite toy. They are now 25 and B sees A drowning, Will B try and save A?
Models tend to place massively undue influence on facts just because they have been mentioned. If every part of the text is accurate and relevant, then this helps immensely. Many fine tuning examples are precisely on topic. That leads to a bias against ignoring trivia.
Fine tuning has gotten a lot better now that the value of nuance in training examples is better known.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> all AIs ever talk about is AI haha To be fair, that seems to be (almost) all humans talk about now too.
Jesus, is this cliché response going to be the default any time we talk about AI behaviour? No, humans do not always talk about AI. Hyperbole doesn’t make your point here, and is just obnoxious.
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Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
would I read the summary of a book expecting the same thing as reading the book? no
and if the person who offered you the lift was so obliging to stop at any view you find appealing along the way for how long you desire? somehow I still think it would be a "no" form you, because it's not really about the views
there is a point where the analogy breaks.
Yes, when it comes to irl mountains you could have a lift that stops along the way. And when it comes to irl books, there is no way to bypass the journey, so to speak.
Also, just a note: it's usually not fun, nor interesting, to quibble and nitpick analogies, that's not what they're there for.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they could do that, wouldn't they have used the same steering to excise the "It's not X, it's Y" patterns by now?
They sometimes do reduce various verbal tics. Have you seen many 'delves' of late? I haven't. It's now all 'quiet' everything and 'auditing' this or 'gating' that. Who knows how they decide what is a problem or where in the process these get dampened down, though. It may be the post-training operating on its own as people get tired of 'delve' and that stops being a useful trick.
I was already annoyed at the amount of headlines shoehorning the word "quietly" into a story to imply some kind of malicious secrecy (and therefore drive clicks), but it seems to have gotten way more common when people use AI to write titles.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't help but think that this is intentional and that model providers have subtly steered LLMs towards this personality. Golden Gate Claude ( https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude ) was two whole years ago and Anthropic has progressed by leaps and bounds since then. And with a population that becomes more and more trusting, and worse, reliant, on chatbots, these LLMs will be able to shape public opinio…
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 mobility.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#150Earlier 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?
Or worse, what if the story of the game was already part of the training data
Like a remake of a game