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.

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?

> 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.

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?

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."