The 2026 Hyperstition Unslop AI fiction writing contest

You can find the winner and runners-up here. I am just starting to read the results. My impression so far is that this is not slop, but it’s also not especially good. The same is true of much human fiction! Consistent with my earlier prediction that AI will have a taste all of its own, ChatGPT rated the work very highly.

This is the opening of the winning story.

They gave me the medal on a Thursday.

The foundation called it a Stewardship — a heavy bronze disc, a ribbon the color of dried blood — and a man in a good suit read out that I had given my life to the preservation of feeling, that I was, he said, a keeper. People stood. June was at the back, not-clapping in the particular way she had, her hands pressed together and still, smiling at me like I’d done something she would have talked me out of if I’d asked.

That night I lay down in the dark and ate the day.

Gwern says:

3. I think the best entries rose to the level of, “I am not upset to have spent my time reading them, and with careful editing, could be good enough I would want to reread them.”

It had not occurred to me before that this would happen, but the suggestion that many of the stories are AI allegories is perhaps not surprising: so much human writing is about human(s) writing, implicitly or otherwise.

While this may seem predictable in hindsight, given that the chatbot personalities are well-known to have various obsessions and tics, including fourth-wall-breaking or AIs, none of the judges expected this to happen or were looking for it, and none of the AI researchers Gwern has discussed it with had expected it (while noting that it’s not that surprising, again, in hindsight).

Why does this happen, when the prompts appear to successfully encourage a relative diversity of stories, everything from contemporary urban horror to wuxia martial arts comedy to creepy fairy tales? It may reflect a very high level of base writing skill (note in particular the stylistic variations in ctrlcreep’s two fairy tale anthology-style stories) combined with subtle systemic biases which gradually, over many tokens and iterations, converges onto stories which satisfy the ostensible requirements but are distorted into the mode-collapsed basins of the personalities’ obsessions.

Is Gwern becoming the leading literary critic of AI writing?