r/OpenAI • u/Puzzleheaded-King584 • 18h ago
Article Yet Another Literary Prizewinner Seems to Be AI
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/10/caine-prize-winning-short-story-seems-be-ai/68896748
u/rushmc1 18h ago
So is it that AIs can't write or that writing contest judges can't read?
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u/zeusoid 18h ago
More that AI, with a good editor is as good as some writers
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 14h ago
I feel like this is the talent. People who are good storytellers and talented editors, but can’t make a great draft, are the only ones who can can truly wield this tech properly. It gives you slop draft, and then you build off of it and edit it until it’s a shell of what the LLM gave into something a writer could do without the LLM
AI is NOT for those who can’t write or edit.
The shame is the writer of the winning entry didn’t edit hardly at all.
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u/lovelacedeconstruct 17h ago
I don't really get what does AI add to the equation here, like there is nothing to writing but your voice and your ideas, its not like coding or math where you have a ton of boilerplate to move from point A to point B
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u/Princeton-Narcissist 17h ago
A good principle in life is that pretty much anything more than 1000 human beings do is incredibly complicated at the highest levels. Writers spend years on a work because “Voice” and “Idea” break into hundreds and thousands of individual elements.
Voice is tone, diction, reading level, etc.
And then those break into subcomponents. Reading level by word complexity, semantic density, or sentence length. Paragraph variety or chapter length.Now imagine that you have a moderately capable editor considering and providing you options on each of those features, customizing and customizing until you reach exactly the output you want.
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u/trejj 17h ago
I would argue it's likely that the contest judges don't spend all their days reading Claude and Codex output like e.g. software engineers do.
Take any sw engineer and they'll be able to smell AI written text from miles away.
Had a similar situation with a local hobbyist paper magazine. They published a contributed article, then got tons of review that "dude, can't you editors see this is obviously AI", who genuinely were "no, how can you tell? The author assured us it wasn't, so we trusted them." And every sw engineer in the room was crying "c'mon, it's obvious from the second sentence onwards that's claude slop."
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl 16h ago
Yeah. If you use Claude/codex regularly you can pick up the AI smell almost instantly.
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u/mobyte 16h ago
Why did people not believe the results when it was already proven that people prefer AI writing to human writing? It was literally scientifically engineered to be appealing to people.
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u/utilitycoder 14h ago
Which AI model was tested because I find AI text output abhorrent.
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u/trimorphic 13h ago
Readers Prefer Outputs of AI Trained on Copyrighted Books over Expert Human Writers:
In blind pairwise evaluations by 28 MFA-trained readers (writers from top U.S. writing programs) and 516 college-educated general readers (recruited via Prolific), AI-generated text from in-context prompting was strongly disfavored by MFA-trained readers for both stylistic fidelity (odds ratio [OR]=0.16) and writing quality (OR=0.13), while college-educated general readers showed no significant preference on stylistic fidelity (OR=1.06) but favored AI-generated text for writing quality (OR=1.82). However, fine-tuning ChatGPT on individual author’s complete works reversed these findings: MFA-trained readers now favored AI-generated text for stylistic fidelity (OR=8.16) and writing quality (OR=1.87), while college-educated general readers showed even stronger AI preference (stylistic fidelity OR=16.65; writing quality OR=5.42).
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u/mobyte 14h ago
It has been tested multiple times with different models, including the example in the OP.
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u/utilitycoder 14h ago
Has there been a correlation of reader IQ to their affinity for AI generated content? That's a serious question.
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u/TheBuddha777 16h ago
What kind of human writing? The average Redditor? Or good human writing.
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u/girlynonbinary 10h ago
As someone who does follow this prize I am shocked at the story that won. I think it's AI, but even if it's not, it's awful. I've read this author's previous work and it's actually good. What on earth were the judges thinking?
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15h ago edited 15h ago
[deleted]
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u/AuthorIntelligent644 15h ago edited 15h ago
Anything that more or less pattern matches on tropes is an obvious target for low effort slop.
I wonder how many AI generated novels where a young boy's dog dies are gunning for a Newbury medal...
My guess would be that the truly excellent writers from the third world will never win these prizes, because their works won't hit all the right tropes.
Not just picking on these kinds of prizes. A lot of literary, film, and art prizes are IMO kind of like this to varying degrees. Everyone knows what an "Oscar bait" film looks like.
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u/AGirlHasOneName 15h ago
I agree with you that I can spot the AI in this paragraph a mile away. I am trying to articulate how I can spot it tho, so that I can describe to others who don’t spot it so easily what it is that makes this very obviously AI.
The things I can point to are the painfully bad metaphors like “stretched the grocery money like elastic” and the attempts to drive the point in over and over with no subtlety. I’m curious if you can articulate this better than me tho. I feel like articulating this is like trying to describe the sense of smell to someone who cannot smell.8
u/Any-Somewhere5129 15h ago
I agree it's probably those awful metaphors/similes/comparisons that reek of AI text:
The money poured out from Father’s pockets faster than he could patch the leaks in his latest aquarium project.
It's awful overall, but this sentence has the vibe of an LLM trying to be funny/creative or whimsical. It's always such cringe. Idk what the name for it is.
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u/sweetbeard 14h ago
It’s like it can only have one thing that it’s driving at at a time, whereas a good human author is building on multiple simultaneous associations and motives
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u/throwawayfromPA1701 14h ago
Thank you! I can also spot it but can't articulate how! Is this how the uncanny valley works?
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u/AGirlHasOneName 14h ago
Yeah that’s a great analogy. Taste is a really, really hard thing to explain and to teach. If you have it, you have it, and you can sense it a mile away. In the case of writing it’s like this intrinsic, gut sense that I feel like I developed some time as a kid from reading many novels. Same thing with human faces, it’s impossible to describe to someone when you see a not-quite-human face what makes it feel not quite right. You either get it or you don’t. It’s something beyond the limits of language.
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u/Low-Temperature-6962 14h ago
I have yet to hear of an AI writing a book with mass appeal as entertainment. A literary prize doesn't have the same standard.
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u/WheresMyEtherElon 11h ago
One of the best-selling book of the year in France was accused of being largely AI-written. The author and the publisher deny. Who knows the truth. But the most interesting thing is that the accusations actually boosted the novel's sales.
And of course, considering how some popular novelists (and most if not all non-fiction from famous people) use ghostwriters, you can be sure that some of them have at least entertained the idea, so I guess we'll see.
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u/chdo 11h ago
Daggermouth, but that's a pretty badly written book regardless lol
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u/Low-Temperature-6962 11h ago
That book was analyzed for AI usage at the prose/syntax level. I am sure that many authors good and bad use AI at that level. That's a level which can detected statistically with a margin of error (bigger error than the AI detection companies admit.)
There is a higher level - plot, suspense, ability to make fantastic events feel real, final resolution. Those can be neither AI detected nor AI generated, AFAIK.
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u/Tartuffiere 18h ago
Some unknown mathematician will come out stating he or she was about to publish their findings, but openAI stole from them.
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u/cough_and_throat 18h ago
Those poor mathematicians and now writers? Oh, the pain the inteligencia must be feeling.
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u/inceptionred 16h ago
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u/redditdork12345 18h ago
I mean at this rate, if you don’t do something with your hands as your main value add, you should be worried. Even then, who knows for how long
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u/Spunge14 17h ago
Oh that's funny, could have sworn it was "obvious slop"
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u/primaequa 16h ago
Wait hold on. It says the story was published in 2021? how does that make any sense
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u/alexmin93 18h ago
The fact AI outsmarts the judge doesnt make it a good writer. AIs really suck at anything that doesnt have a mathematically defineable optimum (do anything creative). But most critics can be replaced with some local LLM with no difference in outcome so I see how AI won here.
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u/bicx 18h ago
I would argue that tasteful creativity isn’t about being completely original, but more about combining multiple existing ideas/concepts/techniques in a unique way. I used to tell people that AI would never achieve true creativity as a statistical model, but then I began realizing how unoriginal and formulaic most human “creativity” actually is. And that seems to be the way humans like it; make it too original, and people are often confused or repulsed.
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u/alexmin93 18h ago
The problem with AI writing is it's self recursive nature. So if a model has some "preferred" pattern it will keep repeating it and it gives it away. And it's a statistical engine so it can't come up with a new idea. So yes it's competent but boring. And knowing those critic snobs who obsess with some metrics I see how AI can "hack" it easily.
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u/clearlysnarky 17h ago
> And it’s a statistical engine so it can’t cone up with a new idea.
You’re falling into the same trap as you did previously regarding creativity. How do humans come up with new ideas? New ideas are already-seen concepts combined in novel ways, and AI can do that. We don’t have any magic sauce that allows us to come up with something completely new that we never saw before.
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u/IDefendWaffles 17h ago
LOL Same cope mathematicians used a year ago. Sure it can put old things together but It cannot come up with any creative math. It's coming for you writers.
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u/alexmin93 17h ago
Math is literally what AI is made for. Ofc a machine that runs on statistics and logic is good at math. And I'm not a writer. In fact I hate writing, I use AI a lot to write (not creative stuff but reports and so on) and it frustrates me how hard is it to get it to write properly without giving away it's nature
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u/IDefendWaffles 17h ago
No, this is not how it works. Math at high level is proving and statistics that it runs on does not help you with that. LLMs generate next token to go from that to doing high level math is completely different. It basically requires the model to master thinking. There is no correlation between its internal workings and doing math. Only thing that makes math easier is that it is pure logic, so once it masters that it can do it better in math. Also math has ready built in bench marks, either you get the proof right or not so its easy to train. But again this has nothing to do with its internals. Now that math is done, they will turn their attention to other softer fields and start figuring out how to best train on them. Then it will be over for those fields as well.
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u/JordanPetterPans 18h ago
It's crazy how easily these literary people are fooled when Redditors keep assuring me it only is capable of producing slop
/s