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- Hacker News
- 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?by zx8080
- X-rated is like 90% of all self-hosted content generation. (Before they removed all the X-rated stuff, CivitAI was impossible to navigate for anything that wasn't smut. Nothing wrong with smut, mind you, but it was really something, quite overwhelming.)by SwellJoe
- 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.
- I feel like 'slop' increasingly means two separate concepts and it tires me a bit.
A) AI produced output that is low quality in some jarring aspects
B) Any AI output whatsoever regardless of quality
by yreg - > 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.
by lifthrasiir - > I would be very interested in the harness more than the actually generated story
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.
by solid_fuel - 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.
by wewewedxfgdf - There are plenty of open-weight models with no such guardrails. Such models are basically the default choice for "collaborative fiction-writing" and "role-playing" tasks.by derefr
- I'm glad someone did this, but It doesn't surprise me that the models are not up to particularly advanced story writing yet. I could see them writing some rather dry high-concept sci-fi fairly soon, but there are some types of story with interpersonal relationships that I cannot imagine a non sentient writer being able to produce. I wouldn't rule it out an AI being capable in the future, but I think if it did, it would mean we would have to seriously consider that it's a sign of a solid understanding of emotions and theory of mind.by Lerc
- I found LLMs very good at reading human chat logs and doing psychological analysis of the participants, and of the interplay
hard to imagine how they do that without a good understanding of emotions/theory of mind
if they pattern match to psychology books, that is still functional understanding since they can operationalize them
by nok22kon - 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.by eliemichel
- Certainly. There's a lot more that could be done and many good research questions here, that I hope there will be followups on, and people running their own better contests. Maybe it could be you! (There may or may not be an official Unslop 2 trying to improve on Unslop 1. I think Hyperstition/Silverbook don't have the money right now to run an Unslop 2, and I have my own projects.)by gwern
- 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.
by networked - >I have a write-up at
You mean your LLM has a write up?
> repository with my work for the
It's not your work, and you aren't a writer if you use an LLM.
by jplusequalt - Thanks for sharing. I‘ve read your write-up but not yet your story.
1. Honest question: What exactly about this contest and way of writing was enjoyable to you? I‘ve seen your very analytical approach for identifying a premise but then relatively little control about all the rest.
2. I‘ve seen on your website that you also write fiction outside of this particular contest. Can you describe a bit how you use AI there and where you see it as helpful / not helpful for writing fiction?
by max-ch - I had an idea for a hard science science fiction short story about five months ago. I had grown tired of Star Trek digging their way out of every problem by throwing techno-babble at it, so I wanted to write something where one scientific leap is made and everything else holds as we understand it.
I thought to experiment with having an LLM help me write it. I wrote a bullet-point outline and had the LLM revise it -- that went pretty well, although it's not the outline I ended up using.
I asked the LLM to write the first section based on that outline. The result was (surprisingly) awful. LLMs are way worse at writing fiction than they are at writing business communication Or maybe I'm way worse at prompting, but the results of this contest make me think the former.
In particular, LLMs are incredibly terse -- the LLM took the bullet point outline and turned it into a twice-as-long bullet point outline.
I wrote the first section myself (expanding from the bullet points by something like 10-20x, and asked the LLM to write the second section, and it failed miserably again. I tried multiple ways to get it to do the job properly, and nothing came out the way I wanted.
So I wrote the whole thing myself, with LLMs serving two purposes: physics review for accuracy -- the story heavily involves special and general relativity, which I'm familiar with, but nowhere near competent enough at to keep the math aligned; and feedback on the story structure.
So I ended up writing the whole thing myself, with LLM consultation on a few bits. In the end it turned into a novella, and I had to re-write based on physics issues (I found about 30% of them, Gemini found 50%, ChatGPT and Claude found 10%, and Fable found 10% late in the game -- Fable's review was amazingly thoughtful) so many times I probably ended up writing a novel in the process :-)
In case anyone is curious: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19e3HfnK1lNHHBef-5c-KvNdD...
by gcanyon - I'm reading your story now -- it's great space adventure! Congratulations!by mwigdahl
- 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.
by beloch - I’m a gamer, #1 is not my dream. Games, as with any other work of art, are also an exercise in curation on the part of the developers. Without that filter, and that common experience with other players, I might as well scroll reels and get an equivalent experience.by argee
- When I know that #1 has been generated by an AI tool, I really lose interest in whatever backstory the character is supposed to have.
Writing in video games is often pretty bad, but at least we used to know / sometimes can know it was done by a guy/gal in an office somewhere, trying to create something interesting. Now it’s just an algorithm.
by keiferski - #1 is rather what unexperienced game developers think what is a gamer's dream. It isn't---in fact, unlimited freedom is a recipe for confusion.by lifthrasiir
- #1 is a marketer at AAA studio's dream, not a gamer's dream. People consuming works of art appreciate quality of storytelling and immersiveness.by sph
- #2 has been fiction for all but 0.1% or less of authors for many years.
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.
by vidarh - 1. Is not a gamer's dream. It's terrible and you'll find out quite fast you're not interested in everyone's background and scream to most NPC's to shut the fuck up and get to the point.
It's just as terrible as injecting 'realism' in games for the sake of 'realism'.
by c048 - Someone's already built #1. I've seen the demo, and it had a wow factor, but ultimately I don't think it'll revolutionize games.
Would Skyrim be better if you could talk to ever guard about what they had for breakfast? Would you ever be able to shake the knowledge that it's just an LLM pretending?
I'm not sure how best to put this. I think for me at least, I get the most enjoyment out of discovering my way through a story that somebody else wrote. This is maybe why I don't like multiplayer games as much a single player experiences. I want another human to tell me a story, and I love the feeling of uncovering the little pieces of story and wondering if I've got it all and how much more there is. If an LLM is just randomly making it up as it goes, I'm not discovering anything. I'm not hearing a story. Instead, I'm just having a transient conversation with myself.
I guess it's equivalent to the difference between visiting an art gallery, versus watching a computer generate fake paintings. One has human intent behind it and that makes it compelling, the other is soulless and empty
by taffydavid - > 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.
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.
by solid_fuel - 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-...
by jalev - > Cliche-driven, over-metaphor'd, statistically-average purple-purpose
That's high literature for you. That's why so few people read it. Most prefer more down to Earth books, but AI doesn't default to that style.
The problem for AI might be that humans wrote very few good books. If you train a model for literary purposes you should weight training material by quality. Which is hard to evaluate.
> 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
Since internet happened, I have this problems with 98% of human written books. A book must have some very strong hooks to keep me reading till the end. "Blindsight" barely made the cut.
by scotty79 - > Cliche-driven, over-metaphor'd, statistically-average purple-purpose _content_
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.
by sph - Training data aka forums, marketing sludge, fan fiction, SEO scrapers (of SEO scrapers...), then the even broader lower-bar places that came after 00s