Says more about literary critics than it does about LLMs.

It's become clear over recent years that literary critics are actually not very good at reading. Whether it's the rush to get through a work, some cognitive bias, or a fixation on fancy words, literary critics are bad readers who rarely understand what they are reading unless it comes in the form of formulaic language and presentation intended to make them feel comfortable with the writing.

LLMs are good at this. It does not mean LLMs are producing quality literature though. It's just further evidence that literary critics wouldn't recognize quality literature if it smacked then upside the head.

Let us suppose you are writing a story/book and you know there are places which you just can't quite get the wording the way you want it.

If you plug only that portion into an LLM and ask for suggestions, would that be considered "cheating"? If so, why would that be any different than asking someone, or someones, to read what you wrote and offer suggestions?

I'm not saying that's what happened here, clearly it was all written by a machine, but is using such a tool to edit your work or get suggestions, bad?

"Not the bees' neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound -- as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there."

Just like any other domain, review is underappreciated work. How many stories were the reviewers forced to read and how well were they compensated?

With both the quantity and quality of LLM generated work increasing, this just follows the same trends everywhere else that review is getting both harder and more important.

...the bastards are also using dictionaries, thesauri, spellcheckers, grammar checkers, style guides, usage guides, rhyming dictionaries, reverse dictionaries, collocation dictionaries, etymological dictionaries, pronunciation guides, idiom references, synonym finders, antonym finders, homophone references, word frequency lists, concordances, corpora, readability analyzers, plagiarism checkers, outlining software, beat sheets, story structure templates, character development worksheets, world-building bible

> As the literary community undertook a closer read of Nazir's story, many criticized its language and metaphors as nonsensical, wondering how the Commonwealth judges could have seen any merit to them.

My coworker used AI to write a document, and it spat out buzzwords that nobody here uses and so the document as a whole didn't really make sense but it sounded eloquent enough to impress my other coworkers. I suspect the same thing happened in this literary contest, because [1]the LLM can have a strong influence o [imdb.com]

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/quotes/?item=qt0440684&ref_=ext_shr_lnk

I'm waiting for a well-known human author to "learn the style" of AI well enough to craft a "good enough to win an award" AI-unassisted story that all the major AI-detectors flag as "very high probability this is written by an AI."

Of course it probably won't happen with any well-known author. Learning someone - or someTHING - else's style could be hard to un-learn. You don't want your future books being tainted by the "this smells like AI" stink.

I happen to know Germanys most popular fantasy author Bernard Hennen a bit. He is mentally preparing for AI to take his job and has been for a few years. He says it's likely that he'll just be managing and steering the world and it's characters and that AI will do most of the writing and come up with new ideas that he then decides on.

That sounds very plausible and AFAICT as someone who GMs table-top RPGs and does quite a lot of writing as a naked ape this is basically where we are at right now already.

So the critics clained there was evidence of AI in the winning writings. At this point I am not sure if any claims of AI can be acccurate. Just the other day I submitted one of my personal webpages to a Search Engine Optimization website that claimed to be able to tell if your page had been written by an AI. (OK, it only accepted the first 2048 words submitted, so the sample is small.) Well, the damned website claimed that my page was "80%" written by an AI. In fact, none of my pages have any AI conten

Soon there won't be any! Everything will be cheapened down to the point where there is no value left. An all that will exist is an ever growing mountain of slop.

If so, the person identified as the author deserves the prize. If it wasn't, who cares.

This story exemplifies what happens when computers are introduced to something. In the end computers ultimately always take longer and create more work.

If humans actually wrote everything like the past, the awards would be handed out and it would be over - short and sweet, the process can be trusted.

But now introduce a computer automating tasks and now we have to stop what we are doing, review the whole mess, try to fix the new problem, redo the entire contest, then add more computers in an attempt to

Anyone who is a fan of James Lee Burke realizes the last few books are either an AI or some human assistant that acts like one is shuffling around previous works with a bit of find and replace. James Lee Patterson probably has not even read half of his books, let alone had a hand in writing them.