May 13, 2026
To infinity... and into the comments
Show HN: I asked AI to write Sci-Fi for eternity
AI tried to become the next Asimov, but commenters called it endless slop
TLDR: A developer built an AI sci-fi machine that keeps producing short stories inspired by classic space books, hoping readers would get endless bedtime reading. Commenters were far less dreamy, arguing over whether it’s clever experimentation or just “infinite slop” pretending to be literature.
A hobby project about AI-written sci-fi that never stops should have been a quirky little internet flex. Instead, the real show broke out in the comments, where readers instantly split into two camps: the curious tinkerers and the “absolutely not” brigade. The creator says they loved short Isaac Asimov-style books, got tired of huge sagas, and decided to let two artificial intelligence writing tools pump out endless space stories instead. First came a forever-book that adds a new paragraph over time; then came a cleaner version, Novel Index, where each story actually ends before the next one starts. Sensible! Sort of.
But the crowd was not ready to hand over the Hugo Award. One commenter brutally summed it up as “Infinite slop,” which is about as close to a review-bomb in two words as you can get. Another went full literary gatekeeper, arguing that 75 paragraphs is not a novel, not even close, and saying the writer was already admitting the ratio of junk to good bits was way too high. Ouch. Others poked at the practical problem: if the story keeps going forever, won’t the machine eventually forget what happened earlier and start wobbling off into nonsense?
And then there was the comedy. One reader seized on the author’s hatred of overlong soap-opera stories and joked they sounded ready for Gilligan’s Island reruns instead. So yes, the project delivered AI sci-fi for eternity — but the comments delivered the real binge-worthy entertainment.
Key Points
- •The author created an AI fiction side project after wanting more short sci-fi reading experiences similar to the Isaac Asimov collection they had finished.
- •The first project, Never-Ending Novel, uses two frontier AI models that alternate writing one paragraph at a time each day.
- •The author says the never-ending format generated interesting ideas and lines but often drifted into repetitive, endless space-opera storytelling.
- •The system is implemented with a Perl backend that calls AI APIs, stores story data directly in HTML, and includes an auto-bookmark feature on the frontend.
- •A second project, Novel Index, ends each AI-written story after a random paragraph range and then starts a new one, creating a shelf of shorter sci-fi works.