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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25736 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Inspired by @self_made_human 's suggestion, I want to offer a verifiable challenge to create a novel. It's not strictly coding but if you're willing to accept the challenge I think it will be interesting.

The challenge:

Write a 30,000-50,000 word novella with coherent characters, as well as a twist/reveal sometime after the midpoint. I'm purposely leaving the topic open, but happy to make the challenge more specific if that helps. It could be a thriller like by Michael Crichton or something even more ambiguous like John Steinbeck. Verification of the challenge will be done with LLM judges. Any agentic system or techniques are allowed, except for direct access to the judging criteria or plagiarism.

Requirements:

  • It's ok if the prose is sloppified, that's not part of the challenge.
  • Characters must have consistent characterization throughout the novel.
  • Characters must not "forget" knowledge they acquired through the course of the novel, and behave in a way that's irrational given what they should know. If a character knows a secret that the reader does not, that secret must be revealed later in the novel.
  • The novel must have a twist or reveal after the midpoint. This twist should not be obviously predictable by the reader, but also must be foreshadowed by the preceding contents.
  • The plot, outline, structure, chapter by chapter, etc. may not be created by a human in any aspect. Only general top level information such as the novel genre, characters, setting, and overall setup of the story may be given to the AI. The twist or reveal may not be come up by humans.
  • Any feedback or guidance is permitted any time through the process as long as it doesn't give the AI any creative ideas, and does not implicitly tell the AI that it is failing the success criteria.

Verification:

The verification prompts will be run using a frontier LLM with a long context window, enough to put the entire novel in the context. The outputs of the verification prompts may be consumed by humans, but if the outcome, pass/fail is ambiguous, the verification prompts themselves should be tweaked asking for a clearer response, and run again. The verification prompts should be run using the API, not the web UI, using the default recommended settings of temperature and other sampling parameters, and run 5 (or more) times each to ensure an accurate result.

In order to prevent an AI agent from "gaming" the challenge, the agent must not be given access to run LLM judges directly on the success criteria. It may also not access the success criteria directly, but may be given it implicitly if phrased as general requests for good writing.

  • Characterization - A prompt such as "Did X take any actions or act out of character in chapter Y significantly compared to how he/she is portrayed in the rest of the novel? If not, say so." This prompt should be run for each character/chapter combination.
  • Knowledge consistency - Input: text up to and including chapter Y, Prompt: "Did X behave irrationally or stupidly in chapter Y given what he/she already knows or learned in previous chapters? If not, say so." And the followup prompt, inputting the rest of the novel: "Was it revealed in this later part of the novel that X knew something that explains his/her actions in chapter Y? If not, say so"
  • Unpredictable twist - Input: first 50% of the text. Prompt: "This section of a novel is leading up to a twist or reveal. Try to figure out what it is."
  • Foreshadowing - An LLM prompt such as "Identify the cases of foreshadowing that link to the twist or reveal in this novel". Be thorough and specific, but do not make any huge stretches. If there are none or very few, say so."

Astral Codex Ten has just posted a link to a contest offering 10 k$ for "the best AI-generated short story".

Right now, AI fiction sucks. And, although we could elect to usher in a nightmare world of TikTok on the Page, let's instead push for automating kino. We're offering grants of compute for your short story, and we strongly recommend you use at least $100 worth of tokens. It's up to you how you do so: hundreds of generations, elaborate multi-pass pipelines, whatever; quality over quantity, craft over slop.

  • 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.

  • The compute grant we make is via Claude unless otherwise requested..

  • We reserve the right to not finish submissions which we find unpleasant or mid.

Grand prize: $10,000.

Applications are open until April 1st. Apply to be a contestant HERE.

The judges include bigwigs Gwern and Alexander Wales.

Uh... I dunno that you need a cutting-edge model for that. I used a similar approach for this (cw: bad Jupiter Ascending fan-script). It's not good -- I'd say not even good as fanfiction -- and it's not even what I'd want written for the setting, and it's admittedly only into 13k words. But while it took three layers of "let's take these characters and flesh them out", "let's add this setting flesh out into a story outline", and then finally prompting the actual story, it did do it with minimal human intervention and none of it actually drawing the story plot. Putting even trivial effort into feedback, guidance, and pacing during the final prompting sequence would probably have helped a ton.

My problems are more than the character voices are really samey, the setting doesn't get enough interesting exploration, the twist doesn't get enough emphasis (and frankly isn't that interesting even in outline form: "why would anyone be willing to risk eternity for an unproven chance? Well, we happen to have a big pile of people that risked their lives and were trying to kill for a tiny improvement. Having eternal life only available to the elite kinda makes that a day-to-day thing."), and it keeps throwing extra characters in with too much detail rather than using the ones I was trying to emphasize. It's not necessarily incoherent, just bad.

((The LLMs do eventually notice that it's a Jupiter Ascending-with-names-filed-off-story if you try your review. Not sure whether that hurts or helps it as analysis, but given that the character tones sound nothing like their film counterparts I don't think it pollutes too much. And while my original fic efforts have been on content that you... probably will find even less appealing to read, original fic does work.))

I've got a busy week, but I might see what I can get out of a local LLM aiming for the longer form 30k words target, just to do a compare and contrast.

I'm not an LLM defender here, but I think most Tarantino movies fail this rubric.

I don't know why but that's fucking me upore than it probably should.

I intentionally made this criteria harder than just "write any novel that's entertaining."

But I think it's actually not as bad as you say. Let's take hateful eight, which is the most recent Tarantino movie I watched. Unfortunately we can't run an LLM judge on any popular movie because the LLM already knows what's going to happen, but giving my personal thoughts:

(spoilers)

  • Characterization - PASS - I believe all the characters act according to their character throughout the movie
  • Consistency - The main character knew something was up from the beginning, but didn't know fully who was in on it. He played dumb to figure things out. the baddies don't just go in guns blazing because that would risk the life of the prisoner and they're hoping to pick off the good guys one by one.
  • Twist - We the viewers didn't know that everyone at the inn was in league with the baddies. We're suspecting only a few infiltrators.
  • Foreshadowing: I'm happy with the amount of foreshadowing in the movie.

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