It's so tiring. I opened the supposed best one hoping at least someone has figured it out but I just couldn't force myself to read it. I really wished AI could do better, and so many people keep talking about the need for "taste" in AI but the rlhf just keeps getting worse every year, only coding gets better (perhaps due to the notable absence of "h" in coding-rl, which we all know stands for HR). I miss when language models actually modeled language. Someone needs to spend a few billion on creating a real model again instead of a mode-collapsed pseudocode compiler (Elon is a poser btw, he won't do it and grok is woke)
2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
51–60 of 157 posts
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#52Earlier 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)…
> 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.
Maybe. I'm not certain that the mathematical average of writing is ever going to be all that great. However I'm willing to update my stance the day an LLM writes a story that makes me cry. Until then I am going to be a bit stubborn about it.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#53Earlier 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.
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-trivial prompting, and rigorous curation, ensuring the final result reflects genuine algorithmic effort rather than the zero-shot 'WYSIWYG' default.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#54so 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
How would you define high-quality LLM output? How do you differentiate it from LLM slop?
I think all LLM output used "as is" for content/entertainment/art is slop.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#55Earlier 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.
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 tools do a great job of handling that.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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" .
I get it. However, consuming data without consent is not well defined, when said data is publicly available on the internet. Licenses for code, and not abiding them are a different thing, I think. Most authors (of books) wouldn't credit their inspirations, unless specifically asked about them.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#57Earlier 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…
[dead]
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#58I 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 don't want to consume "art" that has been generated out the distillation of stealing all of the world's current art It seems that you've fundamentally misunderstood art. I wouldn't personally call it "stealing", but T.S. Eliot would beg to differ (as would Pablo Picasso who "stole" that line) > I want to read something that has intent. That has a purpose. A reason why it exists. If the "allegories for the LLM con…
Are you claiming that LLMs have an intent beyond producing the statistically most "correct" output? This sounds a bit like you are saying LLMs are conscious.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#59Earlier 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…
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 obvious. If its open ended then you have to think a little what to say and ask.
Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
#60Wow, interesting. As not a consumer of content, has the AI content generatiin come to other kinds such as visual novellas, x-rated and the real-world paintings?
X-rated is like 90% of all self-hosted content generation. (Before they removed all the X-rated stuff, CivitAI was impossible to navigate for anything that wasn't smut. Nothing wrong with smut, mind you, but it was really something, quite overwhelming.)
> CivitAI was impossible to navigate for anything that wasn't smut.
I think they had pretty good filters for that. Enabled by default.