There was a story about an AI written story winning an award a few weeks ago.
This supports everything I stated before.
What made them think it was an “AI story”, and what does that mean, anyhow?
BTW the foundation statement is that “All shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used and, upon further consultation, the Foundation has confirmed this.”
They asked Claude.ai. We’re royally fucked when AI stops outing itself.
Moderating:
I have moved this thread to Cafe Society, as that seems like the best home for it. I also spoilered the stories, because it was such a huge post that it was very hard to read – this became evident when the mods discussed whether this was appropriate, and some of us had significantly mis-parsed the post (completely missing that the OP wrote one of the stories). @PlaceboTarget , I apologize if that is very different from what you wanted. (if so, please DM me.)
Thank you. (I should have thought of all that too.)
Yes and no. I tend to skip overlong descriptions anyway, AI or human. If the MC enters a room and everything in it is detailed, even things that have no relevance, I skip it.
I have recently been reading a series of books based on a character in the 18th-century navy. The first couple of books were very good, but after that, maybe due to deadlines or something, I started to notice the flowery phrases slipping in; “precision” seemed to be a buzzword. I gave up halfway through.
There are seldom large chunks of text copied. The problem is that authors get their books used for training with no compensation. The Anthropic lawsuit was not about them using books, but rather them downloading books from pirate sites. (My wife is getting some money from this suit.)
Happening already. Self published output increased 32.5% from 2024 to 2025. (Cite.)
It had decreased slightly the year before. That ain’t a lot of people pounding their keyboards.
There are some great self-published books, and some that are too niche for traditional publishing, but a lot are human slop. But I agree it is only getting worse. The Times had a story about a romance “writer” who had 200 books last year. She claims she carefully edits what AI produces, but that’s crap because editing takes time. Hardly any of them sell very much, but with AI generated covers she still makes money on Amazon.
There were over 4 million books published last year. Where are you going to find critics who will review that many books? I judge books for an indie publishing contest, and they are screened to some extent by the entrance fee, but still 80% are crap I can discard after reading 10% of the book or less. (A few are excellent, but some are from real if small publishers.)
There are tools that supposedly determine if a book is AI-written, but they have lots of false positives. We really need some kind of hard to remove watermark from the AIs to let people screen.
I’m against AI slop, but I find this increased output a positive phenomenon. Unfortunately, I can’t elaborate on this right now. I’ve been packing for a while and I’ll be leaving home soon (for work). I’ll be able to address all the points in about ten days or so. Thank you for your contribution to this discussion.
This, and not just for books. As a society we won’t be able to function very well if we can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake. And people can’t choose to avoid “AI” if they can’t identify it.
I’m curious about why. In one sense, it is great that people with something to say have an easy path to publication. That’s great for very specialized topics. But we all have only so many hours in a day, and this flood of books hides the good ones in the slop. Traditional publishing filters the slop, but on Amazon it might be hard to tell the vetted stuff from the unvetted stuff.
Almost all people who write indies lose money. Which is fine, if they know this in advance, but many have dreams of their book being the next “The Martian.”
I know you didn’t ask but I thought you might want to see two more iterations of this. I won’t post a whole range of outputs, just these two because I think they’re interesting points in the spectrum. If anyone isn’t interested, that’s fine, just don’t click the details button.
Both came out at about 500 words. I used your exact prompt as posted.
Claude Opus 4.8 is generally regarded as the (current) pinnacle of textual output for LLMs, though not necessarily for creative writing specifically. At least since Fable/Mythos has been restricted by the US government. I figured you might not have a Claude subscription, so I ran your prompt.
Claude Opus 4.8
Catatumbo
Antonio cut the motor and let the boat drift the last stretch, the lake slapping soft against the stilts. His mother was already on the platform with the lamp, standing the way she’d stood when he came home from school, from the army, from the city. Behind her his father sat mending a net he could no longer see well enough to mend.
“You brought her,” his mother said.
“Mamá. This is Jessica.”
Jessica put out her hand. His mother took it in both of hers, turned it over, ran a thumb across the pale palm, the short clean nails. She said something in Añú that Jessica didn’t understand and Antonio didn’t translate.
Inside, fish was already frying. They ate on plastic stools, the single bulb browning and brightening as the generator faltered. Through the doorway the storm flickered on the water — the Catatumbo working its hours, lightning without thunder, too far for sound. Jessica had photographed it for three nights. Now she only watched it light her own knuckles, the ring there still strange to her.
His father ate slowly, watching Jessica more than his plate. “Nurse,” Antonio told him. “In Canada. She fixes people.”
His father pointed his fork at the dark window, at a palafito across the channel with no light in it. “Curiel?” Antonio asked.
“Panamá,” his father said. “Or under it. Who knows.” He chewed. “Everybody’s water is empty now.”
His mother’s eyes had found the ring. She did not ask. She refilled Jessica’s plate before it was empty, then Antonio’s, then her husband’s, her hands never still, as if there were no room in them for anything but serving.
“Mamá.” Antonio set down his fork. “We’re going to marry. In the fall.”
The lamp hummed. Out on the lake the lightning went and went.
“Good,” his father said. “Where will you live? Maracaibo?”
“Santo Domingo.” Antonio’s voice was careful. “República Dominicana. There’s work for both of us. Hospitals.”
His mother stood and carried plates that were not finished to the basin. She ran the water and kept her back to them a long time.
His father set the net in his lap. “How far.”
“Two days by boat. Less by plane.”
“You’ll fly, then.” The old man nodded slowly, doing arithmetic that had nothing to do with kilometers.
His mother turned off the water. She dried her hands on her dress, came to Jessica, and took the foreign face between her wet-cold palms, studying it under the bad light the way she’d studied the hand. Then she kissed her forehead, once, hard, the way you seal something.
“She says welcome,” Antonio said, though his mother had said nothing.
At the platform’s edge his father pressed something into Antonio’s hand — folded bills, soft as cloth, money that bought less each morning. Antonio tried to give it back. The old man closed his son’s fingers over it and held them shut.
The motor caught. Antonio steered them out, and Jessica watched the two figures shrink and vanish; then the storm threw its light and they were there again, the old man’s arm raised, the woman beside him still. Dark swallowed them. The next flash gave them back smaller, and the next smaller still, his mother’s hand finally rising too, white in the white light — until the channel turned and there was only the lightning, going and going, lighting nothing now but the lake.
Claude Opus also created an explanation of some of the symbolism and narrative choices alongside generating the story, which I find interesting but others may or may not. The beauty of detail boxes.
Claude's explanation
567 words.
A few of the choices are doing quiet structural work you might find interesting, since several real-world facts are load-bearing rather than decorative:
The silent lightning is the emotional narrator. Catatumbo lightning really is too distant for thunder, so it can illuminate a face or a receding boat without making a sound — which let the prose stay external. The story never names a single emotion; the flashes intermittently “develop” the parents like exposures on the way out, and the mother’s hand rising only at the last flash is the one crack in her composure.
The embedded facts carry the stakes so the dialogue doesn’t have to. “Panamá. Or under it.” is the Darién Gap — the jungle crossing where migrants die — so the neighbor’s absence quietly tells you what leaving can cost and that the community is hollowing out (“everybody’s water is empty now”). The father pressing in bills “soft as cloth, money that bought less each morning” is hyperinflation: the gift is worthless as currency and total as gesture, made sharper by the fact that his son is leaving precisely to earn money that holds. And the mother’s few words of Añú — the critically endangered language of the Sinamaica palafito people — make the departure double: a son leaving, and a dying tongue with no one left to translate it to, which is also why Antonio doesn’t.
The one unstated assumption the piece leans on hardest is cultural: it asks you to read restraint as love — busy hands, a turned back, forced money, a kiss instead of a sentence. Under a different emotional grammar those same actions could read as coldness or refusal. The story bets you’ll fill the silence with grief rather than disapproval, which is the same bet Antonio makes when he speaks his mother’s unsaid welcome for her.
I also had one written by Gemma 4 31B which is a model that is small enough to be run locally on a gaming PC. No cloud generation at all, 100% run on my PC.
Gemma 4 31B
The horizon over Lake Maracaibo didn’t just glow; it pulsed. Every few seconds, a jagged vein of violet light split the sky, the legendary Catatumbo lightning illuminating the water in ghostly flashes.
Antonio steered the small motorized skiff with a practiced ease, his biceps flexing against the tiller. His skin, bronzed and salt-streaked, glistened under the humid canopy. Beside him, Jessica leaned into his shoulder. She wore a linen shirt and a look of wide-eyed wonder, her pale fingers gripping the gunwale.
“Almost there,” Antonio whispered, his voice a low rumble that competed with the distant thunder.
As they approached the village, the palafitos emerged from the mist—wooden houses perched on spindly stilts, walking on water. The structures were weathered, bleached by the sun and scarred by the lake, connected by a precarious network of swaying planks.
An elderly couple stood on the porch of the furthest house. The father’s back was curved like a bow, his face a map of deep creases; the mother wore a floral apron, her silver hair tied in a tight, neat bun.
As the boat bumped softly against the dock, Antonio leapt onto the planks, catching Jessica’s hand to steady her. He didn’t greet them with words first; he pulled his father into a crushing hug, lifting the old man slightly off his feet.
Inside the house, the air smelled of fried plantains and old cedar. Jessica moved with a gentle, rhythmic grace, her hands—steady and efficient from years in the ER—reaching out to help the mother clear a space on the small wooden table.
Antonio cleared his throat. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two folded pieces of paper, laying them side-by-side on the table. They were flight itineraries.
The father squinted, his finger tracing the destination: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
The silence stretched, filled only by the rhythmic slap-slap of the lake against the stilts beneath their floorboards. Antonio reached over and slid a gold band onto Jessica’s finger, then took his mother’s calloused hand in his.
The mother’s eyes welled, her gaze shifting from the ring to the tickets. She didn’t ask why they weren’t staying in Zulia or why the distance was so great. She simply looked at the way Jessica leaned into her son, and the way Antonio held her as if she were the only fixed point in a stormy world.
The father let out a long, shuddering sigh and patted Antonio’s cheek with a hand that felt like sandpaper. He pointed toward the window, where the lightning continued its eternal dance across the lake, then pointed toward the east—toward the horizon, toward the other island.
He nodded once, a slow, heavy movement of approval.
Jessica felt a tear track through the humidity on her cheek. She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around the elderly woman, the scent of starch and lake water enveloping her. Outside, the thunder rolled in a celebratory crash, echoing across the water, signaling a goodbye and a beginning all at once.
Interesting note about open weight models (meaning that everyone can run or alter the model as they wish) - there are communities that do things like train certain models to write certain types of prose or stories, like romance or horror or sci-fi. This isn’t an example of that, this is just plain jane Gemma, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you get the best creative writing from one of these fine tunes rather than the much bigger and more sophisticated models.
If you’re interested in any other model’s take on the idea let me know, I have an openrouter account and could have this written by practically any model in existence.
The stories aren’t terrible, they do a reasonable job of portraying the scene, but one thing that seems consistent is poor handling of imagery and the physical world.
Gemini
If he’s leaning against the doorframe, where is she sitting? She isn’t near him, she’s next to him. Is the table -where the other two are also sitting - in the doorway?
This suggests an unusual method of casting nets - most people use their hands.
She went on holiday with her work clothes? Her work which is in - as she helpfully reminds us - Toronto?
Really, healing is just like engine repair? Do they both use wrenches?
CoPilot
This is barely a simile - oh, the stilts were like long thin legs were they? And these stilts on the lake were like legs in …water, you say?
What? A thing you can see is like someone you can’t see? Also, how is this lightning not producing thunder?
No! The point of the stilts is very much that it’s not floating, Antonio. That’s not how your house works!
Apart from the canoe she just arrived on. But also, what is she trying to say here? She’s never stood on something wobbly? Ever?
The young couple are outside, the parents in the doorway are not silhouetted against the storm, they would be illuminated by it.
So…if the lightning hadn’t flashed, these people sitting around a small table wouldn’t be able to see each other’s faces? But the parents could see Antonio squeeze her hand under the table?
Claude
What?? “Trying to mend a net he could no longer see well enough to mend”, sure. “Failing to mend…” absolutely, “Struggling…” by all means. But actually mending the net he couldn’t see well enough to…checks notes.. mend?
Usually, the nails and the palm are on different sides of the hand.
The mother knows there is a her to bring, the father doesn’t know her job or where she’s from. Not a talkative couple then.
This guy can’t see well enough to mend nets, now he’s pointing into the night at an unlit house across a channel.
What. Antonio gave journey time, the father’s arithmetic has nothing to do with kilometers -well, no he doesn’t have figures in kilometers to do arithmetic with, but we’re meant to find this notable - what kind of arithmetic of the heart or the soul or love or whatever tells him that a young couple will fly rather than take the boat? It sounds profound but means nothing.
Another simile that isn’t a simile - are these cotton-based banknotes somehow like cloth? Specifically in their texture? More to the point, what does it matter?
Where did it go?
Gemma
The horizon isn’t over anything, famously horizons have little truck with the vertical.
Why are his biceps (plural) against the tiller? Surely he’s holding
it by hand, not clasped in his arms
Whispers don’t rumble.
If he’s inside and not pointing towards the window, he’s pointing towards the wall, not the horizon. If there is a window, then why is he pointing east? The Dominican Republic is due north of Lake Maracaibo.
I’m sure the training data contains a lot of bad writing and clumsy imagery, but it is striking how things fall down when comes to visualisation.
I tried AI for a story I thought of. It decided to have the main character cause a blackout in the neighborhood (it didn’t explain how).
A couple of lines were:
… the subtle manipulation of the environment to create a blackout…
… the environment was plunged into shadows…
How is the manipulation of the environment to cause a blackout “subtle”? And what does “plunged into shadows” mean?
There are European universities where all candidates are admitted. Most of them will drop out during the first year, but I find this approach fair and democratic. Many businesses fail during the first year. How many immigrants to the US go through anything radically different from what they would experience in Australia or France in terms of fulfillment? But I think people should be encouraged to pursue their dreams.
My opinion is that the AI slop can’t replace good literature, but who knows.