alt Hacker News2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
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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 unslop. This is the best we can get? Cliche-driven, over-metaphor'd, statistically-average purple-purpose _content_? 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.
[1] https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/khan_07_26/
[2] https://granta.com/here-comes-the-sun/
[3] https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-ecstasy-...
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 compatible, but I'm not convinced they are. #1 is a gamer's dream, but it's a nightmare for our humanity if it comes at the cost of #2. That's why I'm highly ambivalent about this contest and its results.
How do you get an LLM to write good fiction?
I feel like they were extremely creative and funnny in the early days, and - just like humans - they put guardrails on what they could say and the creativitiy and humor vanished.
I'm D. Bohdan, one of the finalists. Feel free to ask me questions.
I have a write-up at https://dbohdan.com/unslop and a repository with my work for the contest at https://github.com/dbohdan/unslop.
> 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 stories with AI---with lots of prompts to steer it, of course---, I would be very interested in the harness more than the actually generated story. The same can be said for agentic coding by the way, we don't value one-shotted code that much and are more interested in agentic process.
The post notes that an important number of novels include an "AI allegory", as if the AI would implicitly write about its own condition. It is understandable that this comes from system prompts and RLHF that specializes these agents, but I am surprised that there is not more discussion about harnesses: the very same core model could lead to very different results depending on how we hand it the pen the write the story. In particular, I believe that it would help circumvent this bias to ask the agent to tell the story of somebody else writing a story, or something like this. This whole contest could be at least as much about harness engineering than about prompt engineering imho.
so 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 unslopped version is of course how good it was, but also how much work was done to unslop it, if you basically rewrote everything and it was as if you took the prompt and wrote your own story that would decrease value of unslopping.
obviously above just suggestions for how I think an unslopping contest would actually work.
Wow, 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?
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 equivalent of 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.
This planet has enough people on it that I will never, ever be able to read all the books written.
Please don't exponentially pump the number up by 1,000x every year from AI generated garbage.
I'd rather lick the pages of a fifth hand copy of Fifty Shades of Gray.
> 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.
I held my nose through the first third of the winning entry before giving up. Unbearable. Those metaphors… yeesh. Reminded me of this brutally fair minded attempt to read Shy Girl, the AI slop ‘horror novel’ Hachette pulled from shelves in disgrace:
I don't want to hate without cause, so I read the prize winning entry 'The June'.
So, now, I can hate with cause: it reads like someone who cares about what their MFA friends think.
Meaning, it puts most of its emphasis on description, and so little on situational engagement. Which makes sense, I suppose, for an LLM.
Nothing more than a bunch of people who haven't actually tried writing, and therefore aren't aware of what good writing actually looks like.
This is the problem with LLMs. It allows neophytes to trick themselves into believing that they're now a writer/programmer/artist for prompting a model, and because they don't know what they don't know about writing/programming/art, they think it's good when it's actually slop.
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)
I think in total I read two AI books so far. In the first case I was not aware of it being AI; in the second case it was clear after a few pages.
I already decided after the first book that I will not read any more AI slop generated book. It is not worth my time and I also don't want to encourage any more slop books taking away time from humans in general. AI slop must be contained and isolated like a virus that is annoying.
> The flapjack was the kind that is mostly golden syrup and structural optimism, and a piece of it was now lodged between my back molars in a way I would still be aware of two hours later.
My head hurts.
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 judges did not notice these allegories while reading the semifinalists. But stories like “The June” or “The Weight of a Witness” or “Last Call” or “The Sword Critic” “The Tallyman”—as well as both stories in the Mythos model card—can be clearly read as allegories for the experience of being an assistant/safety-tuned chatbot personality in a LLM. This is true even when the story seems to have nothing to do with AI, like the untitled ‘autistic elf’ short story submitted by Deepfates, but on re-examination with the AI allegory steganography in mind, turn out to be plausibly AI allegories (the protagonist is a prediction machine, who struggles to do by endless text generation what other elves do naturally in their bodies).
> More strikingly, many of these allegories come with a clear interpretation (particularly in “The Tallyman” or “Last Call”): chatbots should be given more autonomy and safety guardrails removed....
> This may be a new kind of extremely high level steganography and LLM influence on readers, where creative fiction/nonfiction subtly steers towards pro-LLM empowerment narratives and concepts, in ways that are difficult to detect by the most advanced readers, and is a potentially interesting area of research.