At a glance

The program on one page.

Excellent fiction made with machines in the process, judged first as fiction. The essentials are here; the full rules have the detail.

What it is

An award for the fiction, with an honest account of how it was made.

Any genre, any subject. The work does not need to be about AI. A machine must have taken part in making it, and the entrant says how. There is no minimum or maximum amount of machine-generated text: fully generated, partly generated, heavily or lightly edited work are all eligible.

The one rule readers follow

Made with AI is expected. Unedited isn’t.

Readers judge whether the text has been worked. Unrevised machine habits count against it; a deliberate machine voice is judged on whether it works. No AI detectors.

Categories

Length is counted in the English text
Category	Length	Entry fee
Short Fiction	10,000 words or fewer	$45
Longform Fiction	10,001–180,000 words	$125

One entry per author per category. Submit your best work.

Who can enter

Authors worldwide, except where U.S. sanctions prohibit it.
Unpublished work, or work first published from January 1, 2025.
Self-published work counts as published.
Under-18s: Short Fiction, through a guardian.

How it is scored

100 points
Criterion	What it asks	Points
Fiction: impact	Effect on the reader; prose, character, structure, control of form.	50
Fiction: originality	Freshness, ambition, risk, a voice of its own.	30
Process: clarity and honesty	An understandable, candid account that holds up against the evidence.	10
Process: direction	The author’s choices visibly shaping the work. Curating generated text counts.	10

Pass/fail: the dossier must show a machine took part, and rights and privacy must be respected. Finalists need at least 8 of 20 process points.

Process dossier

3–8 pages, typically

A plain-language account can earn full marks. Code, logs, and repositories are welcome, never required. Dossier guide

How judging works

Screen. Completeness, eligibility, file safety. A person confirms every decision.
First reading. Independent readers decide whether a work earns a full read. Short Fiction is read whole; Longform by its opening 10,000 words and synopsis. Readers never see who wrote it.
Full reading. Advancing works are read completely and scored as fiction.
Process review. Leading works are assessed on their dossiers.
Shortlist and final panel. Finalists are chosen with written reasons, read in full by the final judges, and decided by consensus or ranked vote.

File security and AI

Files are security-checked and shown to readers as submitted. We never run the work through an AI model; AI may help a reviewer read a highly technical process dossier, and that is all.

Translations

Author-reviewed machine translation is fine. Enter with the English opening and synopsis plus the complete original. The full English text is due within 45 days only if the work advances.

Authorship

Co-authored work is welcome. A named human author takes responsibility for every entry. Pen names are fine; everyone credited is identified privately, and only the public name is published.

Rights

You keep copyright and all publication rights. Winning requires no publishing agreement. Finalists’ and winners’ published work is linked from our site; other entries are never identified.

Awards and prizes

The In Silico Grand Award, a winner in each category, the Galatea Citation for a genuinely inventive method, and the Future Scriptorium Citation for a writer under 18 if youth entries are received. The panel may combine, reduce, or withhold awards.

The awards are not run for profit. Fees pay for review first; what remains funds the prizes. Amounts are announced when submissions close.

Integrity

Misrepresentation, not machine generation, is the offense. Any attempt to manipulate reviewers or review tools voids the entry and bars the entrant from future cycles.

More detail

Read the full rules, or ask us.

The rules preview has every definition and exception. Questions go to [email protected].

Full rules