This is a story competition from Neal Stephenson, Gwern, and Matt Huang. Fairly big prizes so it will likely attract some good talent. Their stance on using AI (in full below) is "accepted, but discouraged" and they request disclosure of its use. I wonder how they will fair.
1000 - 5000 words, fiction or non-fiction, $100k in total prizes.
Premise
Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
So the Singularity never happens—but GPUs keep getting made. By 2040, there may be the equivalent of 8 billion GPUs globally and everyone has access to a frontier LLM.
What happens in this 'business as usual' future?
Submission Guidelines
EligibilityGenre
- Open to everyone. One entry per person.
Length
- Fiction or nonfiction.
Format
- 1000 to 5000 words.
Copyright
- Markdown or PDF.
Deadline
- Submissions must be licensed CC BY-NC or under a freer license, so they may be republished.
AI Use
- 11:59 PM PT, October 31, 2026.
- LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
IMO, AI disclosure requests are themselves a bit of a minefield to police. What constitutes use? If I use an AI to just bandy ideas about, but don't copy and paste any of its text, is that AI use? What if I use it as a thesaurus to look up a better word choice?
Overall though, I agree that you can't really police AI use and in the end what really matters is the end-result quality.
Probably the best use of LLM in this case would be to help formulate a premise that you know will resonate with Neal Stephenson.
Having read some of his stuff, I think a premise like this would work well:
Local LLM use becomes broadly a 2nd Amendment style issue....nearly everyone in future uses LLMs for personal/family safety both in physical sense and also to combat governmental / big-corp data harvesting. Tied in with this, local LLMs now generate most of the media and entertainment that people consume, hyper-individualistic styles like Beatles+Space Jazz+Baroque+Gregorian Chant.
Likewise totally new "dynamic entertainment" platforms exist that are generated on-the-fly by your local LLM. So instead of going to youtube and watching a pre-recorded video. You scroll sites like "YouPrompt" which are collections of constantly updated prompts (tailored to your history) that your local LLM then generates into a videos on-the-fly.
I will be curious to see if they just get overwhelmed with submissions. If they do, I imagine they will use AI to sort, categorize or rank them in some manner...or they'll simply resort to old fashioned human reputation (find submissions from humans who are known to be serious writers and only read those).
I clicked through the submission form and it doesn't seem to have any really strong mechanism for preventing the tidal wave of slop in submissions. I really hope they write something about the process of dealing with submissions.
On the latest Firefox build "Update your browser to access this website", on the latest Chromium build "Your device does not support this experience". Is this even compatible anywhere at all?
I also had to try to load it on two different devices before it worked.
@TotallyHumanWriter why looking for a "job" when you have these kind of opportunities?