Note: The results of our writing contest 1Picture1000Words are out, and you can read the winners here.
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What is the greatest number of words to ever have been written about a single photo? Okay, I bet there have been millions written around certain photos. Like WWII photos or photos in museums or some Hubble photos of galaxies far away in the universe. But those aren’t really about the photo. Rather they’re adjacent; people who write about the Yalta Conference photograph are not literally writing about the photo, they’re writing about the surrounding context. But what if you didn’t have the context? What if you could only write about the photo?
You would have Instagram captions, I guess. Alt text online for people who need it. But those don’t tend to be thousands of words long. So, back to my original question… How many words have literally been written about one single photo? Is it greater than 528,000?
I don’t know. But I do believe it’s possible that, with our latest writing contest 1Picture1000Words clocking in at 528 official entries, we have set a new record for the number of words written about one specific photo. And boy, what a photo we chose:
I have personally read all 528,000 words about this boring photo of a dog.
So, uh. What did I learn from this experience?
Surely there is something interesting about reading 528,000 words about a photo?
DOG VOICE
So in our last contest, DEAR ALIENS, we learned that if you give a bunch of people a prompt with a semi-obvious response, most people will just do the semi-obvious response. Even if they know it’s a writing contest where their writing will be judged alongside everyone else’s. I guess I respect that in some way, you know, you go “well I’m gonna be obvious but do the BEST obvious one,” and it’s a sort of confidence I would not have going into a writing contest.
The obvious response in 1Picture1000Words was to write a story from a dog’s perspective about dog things. Like pooping and chewing stuff and other doggish activities. What I did not expect is that there seems to be some universal sense of what I would call “dog voice.”
Here is an example of dog voice: Ruff. I hungry. Food good! Yum food. Where hooman?
I read more than 100,000 words written in Dog Voice. In other words I basically read The Odyssey but it was all just Dog Voice. And also it wasn’t even The Odyssey.
Given the chance to impart some sort of complex fantastical interiority to dogs, given the chance to make them secretly smarter and more interesting than everyone thinks they are, most people said, No, I actually want to do Dog Voice. And you know what, I think that’s kind of hilarious. But also kind of horrifying, having to read Dog Voice over and over and over again.
Not all of the stories from the dog’s point of view used Dog Voice, though. Some of them, perhaps forty or fifty, imparted some elevated intelligence to the dog. And in almost all of these cases, the reason the dog was intelligent was that the dog was actually a human.
Or, wait, no. Not a human. But a "hooman". More than 10 stories used the word “hooman” in Dog Voice, but it was the only word they misspelled. Cynically, maybe this is a thing LLMs do when they write in dog voice. Not cynically, maybe everyone just agrees that Dog Voice is when you spell everything correctly except for the most important word. Hooman.
UPDATE: Upon further research, ”hooman” is literally in the Cambridge Dictionary.
WHY ENTER SLOP?
If you told me there was a big car race going on tonight in the city and I was welcome to join, well, I wouldn’t bring my Honda Accord. Why? Because there are basically a billion Honda Accords. And I’m not going to win the race. Why enter with something you know is mediocre?
I wonder if someone has a good answer. In our previous contest, DEAR ALIENS, people had to physically mail in their entries and they felt significantly less AI-affected. Some of them (maybe 10 percent) had obviously used AI in some way, and I suspect at least one of the DEAR ALIENS top 10 finalists used an LLM to help draft their entry. But it wasn’t so widespread. When the writing was bad in DEAR ALIENS it was bad in weird, unpredictable ways.
This time around… I would guess that at least 30 percent of the entries used LLMs in an obvious and ineffective way, meaning maybe 50 percent-plus used LLMs in some way. And I just wonder, you know, why would you do this? Why would you enter a writing contest and then hire the same writer everyone else has? I’m not really mad at people for doing this, I’m just confused. My best theory, and you can let me know if you have any others, is that people get into a mini AI psychosis loop where they talk to LLMs and convince themselves that their LLM-crafted story is better than other LLM-crafted stories. Or something like that.
(I am sure that someone could create an interesting story with the help of an LLM, but the instances I'm referring to in the context of this contest are quite obviously scenarios where people just prompted ChatGPT once and sent it.)
Naomi Kanakia, who we recently interviewed, wrote a piece about how LLM-fueled charges of ‘plagiarism’ will probably damage the careers of all kinds of writers. Essentially people get in this weird feedback loop with LLMs where they end up convincing themselves of things they wouldn’t have otherwise noticed or believed. I wonder if something is going on here with stories, where writers feed their pieces to LLMs and make all the edits the LLMs tell them to make and, within the context of one chat, are told their story is great, and then…
Well and then I have to read it!
STOP DROWNING CHILDREN
So many of the stories involved a drowned child. Like, at least 10 or 15, I lost count. But isn’t that a lot? I mean, of all the stories and writing that could have possibly emerged from this photo, you’re telling me that roughly a dozen people all saw the pool and thought: “bet a child drowned there” and that was their story? It’s not that all these stories were bad, and in fact I quite enjoyed one of the stories which involved this topic. But like… Why?
Besides reincarnation, a child drowning was the most common specific detail in the stories. The most common general detail was death; nearly half of entries featured someone dying.
So I don’t know what you want to make of that.
THE PHOTO
By the end of it I had been taken into the world of 528 separate futures, almost the length of The Bible, for this boring photo: it had been post-apocalyptic and multi-dimensional and fake and metaphorical and reincarnational and sexual (!) and everything else, and I wondered…
Had I truly read the 1,000 words to represent this photo? You can read the winners here and decide.
Or you could go read something else on our site. Hoomans only.
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