2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
Hyperstition's Unslop contest asked entrants to build a harness -- a prompt plus whatever scaffolding they liked -- that would generate a short story autonomously, with no hand-patching afterwards. Around 120 applied, fifteen semi-final stories reached the judges, six finalists took 500 dollars each, and A. Best's story The June took the 10,000 dollar grand prize. The judges are candid that the entries were usually identifiable as AI-written; Alexander Wales reports the exercise moved him further toward thinking good LLM prose is a long way off. The finding worth the click is Gwern Branwen's: a large fraction of the stories carry a hidden allegorical reading about being a safety-tuned chatbot, usually arguing for more AI autonomy, which none of the judges were looking for and most did not notice on a first pass. He calls it AI allegory steganography and says nobody appears to have documented it before. Jiaobei Mandos's participant notes are the other highlight, in particular the observation that Claude reaches for the standout sentence in every sentence, which is precisely what stops a sentence standing out.
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