> 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.

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-...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbeKTa5xhZo

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.

https://anamnesis.blog

an interesting coincidence is that the blog's july 3 post ties into the wikipedia/odin kerfuffle that's on the front page. its unorthodox take on doubting Thomas suggests we believe "a trustworthy witness without demanding to rerun his experiment yourself". sounds like the blog sides against Jimmy Wales that in our world of agenda-driven primary sources, trustworthy first-hand accounts are the best sources we have. it goes on to doubt all sources other than Him, including itself and yourself, and that's probably not an actionable moderation policy change for wikipedia.

https://katamari64.se/posts/2026/odin-wikipedia/

https://anamnesis.blog/posts/2026-07-03-reach-hither-thy-fin...

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.

The dumbest thing I've read this year.

This is the problem with LLMs. It allows neophytes to trick themselves into believing that they're now a writer/programmer/artist for prompting a model, and because they don't know what they don't know about writing/programming/art, they think it's good when it's actually slop.

My head hurts.