Award-winning AI literature

I wouldn't interpret the chart as indicative of the gains in the quality of AI writing; it's more that it's a fairly new phenomenon and there is a dramatic increase in people who try to smuggle AI stories into contests (be it for personal gratification or to "show" human writers), and an increase in the scrutiny that submissions receive.

Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags", just like what we keep telling mathematicians, because we see the discipline as just another market that can be conquered by automation or another benchmark to track. But literature, similarly to most other forms of higher-brow entertainment, isn't just about reducing unit-cost or hacking engagement metrics. For the same reason why a genuine van Gogh painting is worth a lot more than a nearly-perfect replica, people who care about the craft usually care about it telling genuine human stories and celebrating the author as much as the result.

Now, the mass consumer may not care; if you have an infinite Harry Potter sequel machine, many will partake. But then, I guess the question is, if you build the sequel machine, are you leaving the world better off or not? Do you want to be interacting exclusively with machines down the line? And if there's no inherent value to humanity, why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?

An interesting paper from the GPT 3.5 era is "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably" by Brian Porter & Edouard Machery (2024).

Reinforcement-learning on human preferences does work, to an extent. You get LLM output that is (shallowly) highly appealing to humans. That's certainly not in doubt.

The problem is that writing has purposes aside from making hordes of (indiscriminating, low-taste) humans smile. And these purposes are actively corroded by RL'ing on human preferences.

Generally, AI generated fiction has problems similar to the award-winnning stories listed here - they are full of incoherent, "poetic" metaphors, vague gestures to narrative depth that is never delivered on, and relentless pandering to the cheap seats. They're very much "playing the hits" - saying unchallenging, nice things that no reader would ever disagree on. We discover that racism is wrong, that family is what matters, that you have to remember who you are.

They all feature simple (almost generic) motifs, such as trees that represent life. (The repetitiveness of these motifs becomes apparent when you start reading a bunch of stories. In "The Serpent in the Grove" by Jamir Nazir we get "‘People does change,’ he says. ‘But grove does remember.’". In Back and Forth by Kavyta Kay we get "Nani smiled, sad and certain. 'Trees remember everything, beti. They live long.")

It also might be a window into how literary contests are judged.

The recent crop of prize winners have striking similarities. Largely African-American or Indian authors. Stories involving "big" humanistic issues like the legacy of colonialism/slavery, the importance of remembering one's roots, gender-based violence, and so on, with the implication that the writer is drawing on their lived experience somewhat.

I strongly suspect that the prizes are not solely being awarded based on literary merit. Judges of these contests fundamentally want to feel like their work matters: that they're uplifting worthy voices. You can deliberately write in a way that flatters this notion (or get ChatGPT to write for you.)

> The disclosed AI use was apparently limited to inventing the name of a fictional disease. The organizers still counted it among the year’s AI-assisted winners.

This one was interesting to see, because cases like this make the difference between luddite exclusion (anything that transitively comes from 'AI' is spiritually-tainted bits) and accurate disclosure (LLM output is distinguished from human product). Either policy is a valid choice, but lumping the two together as equally 'AI-assisted' tends to confuse rather than help.

This is similar to the 'no gray areas' problem with compiling a list such as https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ai-free-foss-alternatives repo and needing a complex system of tags to avoid mixing projects that have measured/conservative stances short of full exclusion, with projects that have gone full slop-cannon.

If they allow "AI" submissions, it's not a literary award. You can "the future is now, old man" me if you'd like, but the point is that the term 'literary award' in that case does not mean what it means to most people at this point in time.

The Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award appears to be very biased in favour of "AI" "generated" "works". This is the source of 5 out of 13 items in the 'Allowed' category. e.g. from one of the notes:

> The disclosed AI use was apparently limited to inventing the name of a fictional disease. The organizers still counted it among the year’s AI-assisted winners.

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I haven't scoured through all of the listings, but I've found several that are included for pretty weak reasons. e.g. in "suspected or disputed":

> A screenshot of a 100% Pangram result spread online. No author response, organizer investigation, admission, or revocation has surfaced.

_A_ screenshot? Of Pangram? A perfect score? And nobody officially responded to it? Wild. By the way, the piece being referred to has a scattering of em dashes throughout, including one in the opening sentence. Make of that what you will. Or don't -- it's a perfectly normal way to punctuate English prose.

I think maybe people should be able to understand that the Pangram thing is 100% a joke by now -- yes, I checked, 100%. It was damned from the off by the simple fact that it's a service for people who sensed "AI" and want that confirmed. Of course one could also consider the lack of evidence demonstrating its efficacy, or the theoretical and practical difficulty of building software to perform the task [the advertised one, not the task of giving the customer what they want], etc.

::

To be clear, the article here isn't really the target of my ire, as it's largely just a collection of notes. Actually there is one thing I wanted to criticise -- you can't include entries getting shortlisted as examples of "literary awards granted".

Unpopular take: AI slop is actually just slop. (Most) people ultimately don't or won't care if writing or other media is partially or wholly authored by AI. Same with art. I feel as much righteous indignation as the typical person as I write that, I think. "I want humans making art that makes me feel these profound feelings!" I say to myself. But if I don't know who the creator is, all I have to go on is the art.

A sort of related concept is that I may dislike, actively hate, or be completely indifferent to some of the authors and artists whose work I love. I love their work, but I may not love them. I may choose to spend time with people whose art I dislike. So it is with AI. I dislike the idea of AI, so I claim to dislike the art.

As amazing as AI writing is, we are still in the uncanny valley, and that is why we hate it.

Imagine the holodecks in Star Trek, which for my argument I'll consider to be significantly more advanced AI, and significantly closer to crawling out of the uncanny valley... the people using them ultimately hit the same wall of "oh but this falls short of real human experience."

We really need more terms for AI-assisted writing. There's degrees to everything and writing is one of those things where there's LOADS of gray areas. Did you use AI for research? What about generating random names for characters/places? Did you use it to check your grammar (why do people even care about this? They do!)?

Anything touched by AI is starting to become "the fruit of the poisonous tree" for a lot of people and it's getting ridiculous. I've chatted with people who will refuse to read a story because they think the cover art was generated by AI (even though they don't really know; they're just guessing). "It's AI slop."

One of the listed stories was almost disqualified for that very same reason (AI cover art). Another was controversial because the author used AI to generate a random name for a disease.

If we had better terms for the levels of AI involvement, maybe people would get a little less worked up about it?

Bit of a side question to the crowd:

If anyone wants to commission an AI novella, holler out to me. (For free -- this is a hobby)

I've been trying to build an automated book publisher for about a year now. While the books aren't yet "human good", the slop factor is getting fairly low. Part of that is because I've stuck to formats easier for AI to avoid the uncanney vally in: recipe books, historical re-tellings, etc.

This is just an AI news dump. In case some people think this is cause for celebration, maybe in 2 years we'll get: "Award-winning inflatable Optimus robot doll is indistinguishable from humans."

What is the point of all this?

Feels disingenuous to list prizes for contests like UCSB Mind & Machine Intelligence Writing Contest or the Electronic Literature Organization, where the whole point is to have machine-assisted stories.

That’s like saying “my toddler won a national art competition” and then finding out the contest only allowed entrants by toddlers. Or like when someone bragged about their vibe-coded game making $25K, and it turns out they just won the $25k prize in a game vibe-coding competition.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890743

It’s meaningless data. Worse than meaningless, as it obscures the validity of what’s around it.

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