alt Hacker NewsA contest of skill is not necessarily like spinning a roulette.
If I were to play Lebron James in basketball 1v1, it would not matter how many times we ran the experiment. We could play a trillion times, and I would win 0 of them.
If you sampled 10 Hollywood directors and asked whether The Godfather or The Room is a better movie, the Room would win the poll 0 out of a trillion times.
The reasonable naive expectation for contests like these is that, below a certain bar of quality, the chance of win is 0. So if you see wins go up as volume of submissions goes up, it shows that either ai writing is above that bar, or that faulty judging is a widespread problem beyond a few anomalous organizations.
You can't win a competition without entering it.
You have better than zero in a trillion odds against Lebron James. What if his phone rings?
"10 Hollywood directors" is hilariously unconstrained -- I'd put money on at least one having never seen The Godfather.
> The reasonable naive expectation for contests like these is that, below a certain bar of quality, the chance of win is 0.
I agree that the layperson's understanding of what 'literary award' means is close to this idea, but the "contests like these" is the problem here. "contests like these" include one that allows and seems extremely keen on "AI" generated text, for example.
There isn't a stark contrast between 'contest of skill' and 'game of chance'. You can eliminate the skill part and get closer to pure random chance, but you can't eliminate the random chance from the contest of skill.