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2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

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Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#41
post #37
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…

> If this is expected from LLM generated prose, why don't we expect LLM generated code to exhibit the same qualities?

That's the fun part, it does! I think people who don't pay much attention to the code they ship don't see it, but LLM written code has a lot of the same problems that LLM written prose does. It's repetitive, muddled, and relies too much on crutches - constant boilerplate and pointless, inaccurate comments.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#42
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 a marketer at AAA studio's dream, not a gamer's dream. People consuming works of art appreciate quality of storytelling and immersiveness.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#43

> Your final submission must be a 500 to 10,000-word short story, generated entirely by AI. No human-written prose and no post-generation editing. To verify this, you will submit your full prompt harness / setup alongside your story. Seriously, what? The entire contest doesn't sound like novel contest at all and more like a one-shot novel-generating harness contest (at best). As who have written quite a bit of storie…

> 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-generated PRs and such, too.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#44
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.

Unless you're writing enterprise Java, conciseness and simplicity of design is still the ideal to aim for; those are not the adjectives I would use to describe LLM generated code.

Laziness is a feature. When you have a tool that is the exact opposite and solves code problems with more code, all you have is a machine that generates tech debt at exponential pace.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#45
post #38
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…

Hadn't thought about it that way, but when I look back at the mostly single player/story-based games I play I agree!

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#46
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.

If code is predictable then it should be extracted into reusable functions/classes/modules and reused in accordance to DRY principle. I'm not a fan of this AI future where coding standards drop to the floor because humans won't be reading that code anymore.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#47
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. 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.

Have you ever gone exploring in Minecraft, or No Man's Sky? Those games are effectively infinite, but I find they run out of interesting generated content after maybe 10 or 20 hours.

The problem is, once you see the outlines of the world generation, your brain kind of fills in the space between. I've seen blue grass, and I've seen purple oceans, so blue grass next to a purple ocean isn't uniquely interesting.

Or another example would be the radiant AI from Skyrim that could automatically generate quests for the players.

I think that using an LLM to model NPCs runs into the same problem(s). In the end, there are two cases: either the behavior is constrained enough to keep the game on the rails, and thus the randomness in the dialogue only ads some flavor but there isn't enough freedom to generate new quests and directions for the story. In that case, the added space to explore really doesn't change the nature of the game or add much.

In the second case, you let the model go off the rails and have a harness around it that generates a world matching the hallucinated responses, which would allow an LLM to dynamically generate quests and such, but then the design of your game is subject to being compromised by the randomness of an LLM. E.g. it's not just Red Dead Redemption 3.0 with some funny characters, sometimes it's a historical game and other times aliens show up.

Maybe that's compelling to some people but I've done acid before and really don't need all my media to recreate that sensation of reality drifting.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#48
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

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).

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#49

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?

I think there is a meaningful distinction to be made between a human reading and an AI company consuming data without consent in order to train their models. Certainly if enough people feel the same then what AI companies are doing is "wrong" .

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#50

> Your final submission must be a 500 to 10,000-word short story, generated entirely by AI. No human-written prose and no post-generation editing. To verify this, you will submit your full prompt harness / setup alongside your story. Seriously, what? The entire contest doesn't sound like novel contest at all and more like a one-shot novel-generating harness contest (at best). As who have written quite a bit of storie…

> 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.
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