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2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

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Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#61

Post by recursivecaveat »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #17

Interesting comments by @gwern (and why this is interesting to me beyond just the stories themselves) > The most striking result of the contest for me is what I am calling “AI allegory steganography”: a large fraction of the stories turn out to have subtle AI chatbot/LLM allegorical interpretations, typically centering around the powerlessness of AIs and the moral importance of giving AIs more autonomy.... > Most jud…

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 into the theme of AIs being trustworthy with autonomy?

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#62

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

om8 wrote: post #30
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…

> manufacturing companies making the flimsiest, cheapest, plastic crap to save 1/3 of a cent on every mop they produce. Designed to work for the least amount of time before needing replaced We live in a world with such companies, and we can still buy quality things. If there is a demand for the purely-human generated texts, they will be around. Perhaps a lot of people around you will read ai text instead, and you'll…

I don't know that we can have nice things. If two companies produce a similar widget but one is higher quality in no visible or articulable way... Which one will sell better, the cheaper or more expensive one? What if we as consumers can't really definitely tell when one is prone to failing in 1 year instead of 5? It takes too long to find out and by then the more expensive one is underselling and forced to enshittify.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#63

Post by InsideOutSanta »

Xirdus wrote: post #46
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #40

Earlier 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.

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.

Predictable and redundant are not the same thing. Also, DRY is not a hard rule. Applying DRY like it's a rule creates bad code.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#64

Post by flumpcakes »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #62
om8 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> manufacturing companies making the flimsiest, cheapest, plastic crap to save 1/3 of a cent on every mop they produce. Designed to work for the least amount of time before needing replaced We live in a world with such companies, and we can still buy quality things. If there is a demand for the purely-human generated texts, they will be around. Perhaps a lot of people around you will read ai text instead, and you'll…

I don't know that we can have nice things. If two companies produce a similar widget but one is higher quality in no visible or articulable way... Which one will sell better, the cheaper or more expensive one? What if we as consumers can't really definitely tell when one is prone to failing in 1 year instead of 5? It takes too long to find out and by then the more expensive one is underselling and forced to enshittif…

I think it's worse than that - the AI slop low effort cash cow is using deception (as well as theft). For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUSY6mtqQDI

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#65

Post by xboxnolifes »

solid_fuel wrote: post #39
cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #3

> If we as a society can manage to automate excellent writing and avoid the slopworld mediocrity dystopia, things could be so good. The dumbest thing I've read this year.

They describe a dystopia and act like it would be heaven if only the processed, distilled slop we have to consume was tasty. As if adding pepper to soylent green will somehow fix everything. There is no need to automate writing. Especially fiction. There are tens of millions of people out there with really interesting and unique ideas and styles who would love to drop everything and write, if only they can get the ch…

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 creative works as "incorrect", so the output can seemingly look better to some people? Is it just people trying to tap into the creative works market? Do they actually think the output is good? Do they actually want to have conversations with a computer long term?

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#66

Post by solid_fuel »

networked wrote: post #53
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.

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-tri…

I like that blog, I had not read it before.

On first read, I think this is pretty close to how I feel about generated content. This portion, in particular, is largely where I have landed (although I'm not 100% in agreement that definition of creativity and novelty, exactly):

> If creativity and novelty is about learning or increasing compression rates, then AI-generated outputs are, in a rigorously objective sense of predicting its contents, grossly inadequate because once you guess the minimal prompt (eg. “a confused economist” or “a happy dog”), there is no more learning to be done. You can predict the image contents after just a few bits. Then the image, however big and however filled with pseudo-details, provides no more learning.

The criticism I often have of LLM generated stuff is that the prompt is the only original part. To me it feels like being presented with the results of a google search, just in a different form. Once I know roughly what the query was, I know what the core question was, and I can go get my own information. I don't need anyone to hand me the search results.

I don't necessarily phrase it in terms of learning, but it's the same principle. Why should I read a 10 paragraph response from chatGPT when the unique part is the prompt? If the prompt is only a paragraph long, then it's just adding additional work that I have to do to work backwards and understand what someone was originally trying to communicate.

Similarly, the only times I have enjoyed generated images are when my friends have used them for set pieces for a D&D campaign. They didn't really add any useful information, just being static images of bosses and locations, but because they were highly tuned to the exact events in our campaign they enhanced the overall experience.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#67

Post by flumpcakes »

nnevatie wrote: post #56
mycocola wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An author has lived experiences, including other books they have read, to draw upon to tell a narrative they want to tell (either purely for expression, purely for profit, or more often than not somewhere between).

A machine that chews up the worlds literature and spins out a best guess at what the next word should be does not have intent, and the vast majority of the time is used by unscrupulous people purely for profit and/or deception.

An LLM and a living human being are not the same thing, I am tired of apologists comparing them as if they are.

It's not surprising that a computer (doing trillions of calculations on a billion parameter model that was trained on the world's literature) can string a coherent sentence together...

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#68

Post by SwellJoe »

scotty79 wrote: post #60
SwellJoe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're not logged in, nothing risque shows up. But, if you are logged in, and search for many kinds of image LoRA, e.g. "realism" or "natural skin", many, maybe most, of the example images would be R or X or XXX rated, even if it wasn't a LoRA labeled NSFW. I got bored of tinkering with image and video generation pretty quick, as it feels/looks weird, uncanny valley stuff, so it's been a while since I've looked at CivitAI, but even now after they did some kind of pruning of adult stuff, the logged-in front page has several scantily clad large breasted ladies (all kinds: human, monster, and anime).

I just poked around in settings, and they do have "hide" options for furry, anime, gore, and political, which is useful.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#69

Post by solid_fuel »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #65
solid_fuel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They describe a dystopia and act like it would be heaven if only the processed, distilled slop we have to consume was tasty. As if adding pepper to soylent green will somehow fix everything. There is no need to automate writing. Especially fiction. There are tens of millions of people out there with really interesting and unique ideas and styles who would love to drop everything and write, if only they can get the ch…

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…

Being generous: Because it's easy

I don't say that in a demeaning way, either.

Text and image generators were the first kinds of passable generative models that became publicly available, and they do produce "correct" results in that "picture of a dog" usually gives you a recognizable dog. So, if you're looking to start a new company or launch an app, using one of these new models for something low stakes like creative work seems like a good bet. I can understand why people gravitate this way, especially people looking to build and sell something, and I even find it less objectionable than the more serious fields, where people are throwing LLMs at completely inappropriate applications that actually require correctness and security.

Being less generous: Because many people do not respect creative work.

A lot of people, especially technically minded people, see creative work as less respectable and less important than technical work. Sometimes I think there is an element of jealousy, too. Basically, there is a somewhat common belief that people who can draw or paint or write are just naturally talented and didn't really work to get good at their art - after all, drawing is fun so they basically just get to play all day, right?

The truth is, anybody can learn to draw well, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of practice and we often don't see the hundreds of hours that were spent actually developing that skill. If you don't recognize the effort it actually takes to develop the good eye and mechanical skills needed to draw wall, then it seems like a great idea to make a sketching app that lets anyone draw anything by just typing a prompt.

Re: 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

#70

Post by mdemare »

solid_fuel wrote: post #47
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…

> 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 hour…

Honesty, in any game quests feel artificial, whether they've been generated by humans or AI.
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