6.6 KiB
Announcement: Intelligence in Literature Monthly Prize
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Author: u/vaniver *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/5lnj5r/announcement_intelligence_in_literature_monthly/
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Score: 67
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Created: 2017-01-02T20:53:09
Post:
Starting in January, the artificial intelligence nonprofit MIRI will be giving out monthly $100 prizes for high-quality fiction that engages with topics related to intelligence. Send submissions to intelligenceprize@gmail.com, either as a link or as an attachment.
This prize is intended to reward people who write thoughtful and engaging stories about artificial general intelligence, intelligence amplification, or the AI alignment problem. We're looking for authors who help readers form better mental models of intelligence as a highly general problem-solving capacity (not as a parlor trick for memorizing digits of pi), and who help readers intuit that non-human minds can have all sorts of different non-human preferences (while still possessing instrumental intelligence).
The winning stories are intended to show (rather than tell) these ideas to a broad, diverse, and intellectually curious audience. Popularity is a big plus. Loud signals of group affiliation (e.g., with the rationalfic community) are minuses, rather than pluses. Conscious attempts to signal that the ideas are weird, wonky, exotic, or of merely academic interest are also minuses. We're looking for stories that just take these ideas as reality in the setting of the story and run with them. In all cases, the most important evaluation criterion will just be submissions’ quality as works of fiction; accurately conveying important ideas is no excuse for bad art!
The prize will be allocated once a month. The first prize will be awarded in February, and will be open to any story submitted between now and the end of January. There are no length or genre requirements. To be eligible, the story must be first published within two months of the deadline: anything written in December or January is eligible for the February prize; anything written in January or February will be eligible for the March prize; and so on. At the end of the month, we'll read through the entries, select the one we liked the most, and reward the author with $100. While we expect that most submissions will be freely available online fiction, public availability is not a strict requirement.
The prize money comes with no strings attached. We don't want any rights to your writing, and we don’t want to restrict you from publishing it anywhere else or from getting any other awards; we just want to encourage the creation of more good fiction that engages with ideas in this space, and we want to help publicize such fiction once it’s out there.
Comments:
u/VanPeer [+12] The shard made me do it*
Thanks for posting. Care to link the original announcement? Can't seem to find it on MIRI's webpage or via Google.
u/vaniver [+13] *
This is the original announcement! Feel free to spread it around to other places where you think people would be interested.
u/grep_cat [+4] *
For the same reason that people put up verification for AMAs, it might be helpful to put something on MIRI's website (or twitter) and link to that. I for one think you should link to a tweet which links to this post. Edit: Oh wait, it's in the January newsletter
u/Roxolan [+8] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager*
Written October 1st, 2016: Crystal Mentality is in the late stages of being edited and should be out in January of 2016. nobody tell him
u/vaniver [+2] *
It didn't work :P
u/Roxolan [+1] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager*
Changed your mind? Link is deleted.
u/vaniver [+1] *
Hmm, looks like the prize announcement got shadowbanned.
u/Gurkenglas [+6] *
I remember reading you may want to reward such fiction retroactively. Did EY write that? googles 'writing subreddits': /r/WritingHub/ may be interested in this, or helpful in finding those who are.
u/vaniver [+9] *
Anything written in December is eligible for this first prize, but we don't have any longer-term retroactive rewards yet.
googles 'writing subreddits' One of the reasons to announce this prize here and not, say, /r/ScienceFiction is that the average quality for this specific prompt is probably better here than there. If we don't get enough submissions, we can broaden the net later (which seems better because we'll have some examples of past winners to set the tone).
u/embrodski [+3] *
Well I'll be a mother lover! This is fantastic! Can we sticky this? Also, is it OK to share this more widely? Or is that not a thing that we want to encourage yet? I was thinking places like Open Call SF
u/vaniver [+3] *
Feel free to spread it around where you think people will be interested!
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning*
Clarification request: fragments of a larger work? e.g. if one of the regular rational fics on this subreddit were to submit a new chapter that is clearly intelligence-heavy, would that be disqualified due to being open-ended on both sides?
u/vaniver [+3] *
If you think those fragments will stand alone as their own thing, then submit them, but try to make sure that either you're submitting a complete fic finished in the last two months or you're submitting a fragment that was all published within the last two months. (If you've got a chapter or arc that's relevant, submit them, but don't just submit your whole fic up to the current chapter every month.)
u/alexshvartsman [+2] *
This is a little unclear: do you want stories -written- in the two months preceding the deadline or -published- within that time frame? If you want to consider work from pro venues, those are never the same thing. :)
u/vaniver [+2] *
If it's a pro venue, published; we're aware about the lag there.
u/susruta [+1] *
https://intelligence.org/intelligence-in-fiction/ Here is the link