Hyperstition for Good: A Writing Competition to Help Shape the Future of AI

Hyperstition is the idea that narratives can be self-fulfilling, that describing a future helps bring it about. The concept may sound mystical, but it has a concrete mechanism in artificial intelligence: models learn patterns of behavior from the examples in their training data. The stories we tell about AI today are shaping the AI of tomorrow.

This is a problem, because most fiction about AI is dystopian. From HAL 9000 to Terminator, our cultural archive is dominated by narratives of machines that deceive, dominate, or betray. When frontier models train on this corpus and are then asked to predict what an AI would do next, the prophecy risks fulfilling itself. Recent work on alignment midtraining (Brazilek & Tidmarsh, 2026) suggests the inverse is also true: targeted exposure to compassionate examples measurably shifts model behavior on welfare benchmarks.

Hyperstition for Good is a writing competition designed to produce that better corpus. It’s invited writers to imagine futures in which AI, humans, and other sentient beings flourish together, with a focus on non-human sentient beings—animals, digital minds, and others whose lives are underrepresented in existing literature—and on stories that imagine AI as a thoughtful steward of their wellbeing.

Gathering data through a writing competition yielded higher-quality and more diverse samples than purely synthetic generation. Human involvement introduces randomness that is valuable to labs. The competition received over 5,000 submissions, and selected pieces are being compiled into midtraining packets to be shared with frontier labs. Future competitions will be held twice a year.

View updates and submit your writing:
http://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai

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Presented by Hailey Sherman
Mentored by Jesse Gilbert

Sentient Futures Project Incubator Showcase Spring 2026

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