The dumbest thing I've read this year.
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 chance to have their work seen.
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.
A) AI produced output that is low quality in some jarring aspects
B) Any AI output whatsoever regardless of quality
If a verb unslop means to reverse. I thought that was a more interesting idea.
As a noun I think you would not use unslop to mean the opposite of slop but rather non-slop.
Based on my grammatical preconceptions of how I would use slop I felt that unslop had to be a verb, and the contest should somehow reflect that.
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.
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.
It's just as terrible as injecting 'realism' in games for the sake of 'realism'.
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 where even the best models are now to come close to RDR2s production quality.
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 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.
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 get upset because of it, but it's their choice. You'll still have your thing
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 condition" angle is accurate, then these stories do. In which case I believe what you mean to say is that you want to read something that has human intent.
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.
> 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.
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.
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-...
If this is expected from LLM generated prose, why don't we expect LLM generated code to exhibit the same qualities?
> 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
It's great. Human creativity is still king despite the attempts to reduce it to a few algorithms for talentless hacks to exploit with the click of a button.
Who but the sociopath would hope to supplant human creativity with a machine they control? I wish your position wasn't so widespread in these parts.
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.
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-generated PRs and such, too.
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).
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.
I think all LLM output used "as is" for content/entertainment/art is slop.
As of a few years ago - before AI writing was an issue - the average full time author in the UK would have earned more flipping burgers (but their household incomes are above average - it's a middle class hobby for most).
And only a miniscule proportion of authors are full time.
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
[1]: And even those are subjective. I wouldn’t want that, and the other replies so far agree that would be bad.
This is no longer fiction - see the latest AI update of PUBG.
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 hours.
The problem is, once you see the outlines of the world generation, your brain kind of fills in the space between. I've seen blue grass, and I've seen purple oceans, so blue grass next to a purple ocean isn't uniquely interesting.
Or another example would be the radiant AI from Skyrim that could automatically generate quests for the players.
I think that using an LLM to model NPCs runs into the same problem(s). In the end, there are two cases: either the behavior is constrained enough to keep the game on the rails, and thus the randomness in the dialogue only ads some flavor but there isn't enough freedom to generate new quests and directions for the story. In that case, the added space to explore really doesn't change the nature of the game or add much.
In the second case, you let the model go off the rails and have a harness around it that generates a world matching the hallucinated responses, which would allow an LLM to dynamically generate quests and such, but then the design of your game is subject to being compromised by the randomness of an LLM. E.g. it's not just Red Dead Redemption 3.0 with some funny characters, sometimes it's a historical game and other times aliens show up.
Maybe that's compelling to some people but I've done acid before and really don't need all my media to recreate that sensation of reality drifting.
Here's the age-old dilemma, though - how is reading stealing?
Laziness is a feature. When you have a tool that is the exact opposite and solves code problems with more code, all you have is a machine that generates tech debt at exponential pace.
That's the fun part, it does! I think people who don't pay much attention to the code they ship don't see it, but LLM written code has a lot of the same problems that LLM written prose does. It's repetitive, muddled, and relies too much on crutches - constant boilerplate and pointless, inaccurate comments.
zx8080•1h ago
SwellJoe•1h ago