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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25890 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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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.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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