Vocal Challenges

Welcome to another installment of my Vocalite manifesto! If you missed the short introduction to this project and you'd like to check it out, it's linked below.

My focus in this installment is Vocal Challenges. The three things I intend to address are Challenge Prizes, Integrity of Winners, and Challenge Types. So here we go!

Priority and Distribution of Challenge Prizes

In one of my previous installments of this manifesto I discussed Leaderboard prizes that I believe should be discontinued. So where should those prizes be reallocated? It might just be me, but it seems like the Runner-Up prizes have been looking a little lean lately. Additionally the recognition of Honorable Mention has been introduced but without any financial prize to go with it.

Placing in a Challenge should be a big deal! And the prizes should reflect that. If the Runner-Up prizes are less than the 1st place Leaderboard prizes I think that says some priorities are misaligned. And if an Honorable mention doesn't even get the $5 that a Top Story receives, it seems like a bit of a hollow gesture.

I know I first joined Vocal+ because I saw ads for a Challenge that really excited me. And in addition to an enticing prompt there were some pretty great financial incentives on the table. I think the reputation of Vocal Challenges should matter to the platform and to us Vocalites. It is probably one of the main draws for people to become Vocal+ members.

Even in the not so distant past some Runner Up prizes were as much as $50. Now it seems $15 is going to be the new norm. I do realize the frequency of Challenges has increased recently and consequently the frequency of prizes being awarded has also increased. But as I've previously stated, if there's only so much prize money to go around I think Vocal should prioritize the Challenges over things like Supportive Commenters and Most Subscribed to Creators on the weekly Leaderboards. It says a lot about what Vocal cares about and the types of Creators they're wanting to cater to with where the money goes.

If the Honorable Mentions are going to be recognized I think they should at least get $5 like a Top Story. If the piece had enough merit to be selected as an Honorable Mention there should be a way to give them a monetary prize. I mean plenty of entries to challenges that never actually place get the prize of being selected as Top Story. So if these Honorable Mentions are being selected as winners over entries that get picked as Top Story but they don’t even get as much of a money as a Top Story that’s kind of messed up. If money is tight do one less Top Story a day and you've got the funds to do it!

I also would certainly be in favor of some differentiation (big teacher buzzword) for the Runner-Up prize amounts based on the type of Challenge. For example maybe a Runner-Up prize in a 2,000 word short story Challenge should be a bit higher than that of a haiku Challenge? Perhaps $15 is fine for a haiku, but the 2,000 word piece should be toward the $50 range. Just a thought though and feel free to disagree!

And speaking of differentiation, there could also be some adjustments made to how many Runner-Ups and Honorable Mention prizes there are based on how many entries there are to a particular challenge. Maybe Vocal could guarantee 10 Runner-Ups and 5 Honorable Mentions for every challenge but add more for popular challenges. For example a challenge that has 150 entries wouldn't need a longer winner list. But a challenge that has 600 entries? Do 15 Runner-Ups and 5-10 Honorable Mentions. And a Challenge with 1000+ entries, how about 20 Runner-Ups and 10 Honorable Mentions? (Don't forget I think there should be monetary prizes for HMs if they’re going to be a thing.)

Lastly, I think a true podium needs a 3rd place! I like things that come in threes. There's something more complete about it. We've got gold and silver, but where's the bronze?

If, as I'm recommending, $100 of Leaderboard prizes each week were reallocated to Challenge prizes, this doesn't seem like too much of a stretch. And with a bit of differentiation based on Challenge type and number of entries, I think Vocal could really polish up the allure of the Challenges and ensure that more of the platform's monetary prizes are going to Creators who are contributing in more valuable ways to the platform.

Verified Integrity of Challenge Winners

I think most creators would agree that any piece that is plagiarized or generated by AI should not be selected as a Challenge Winner. If you're thinking that would never happen I invite you to play a little trivia game with me:

Question #1 - Which one of these Spooky Micro Challenge entries is not like the other? (Hint: green circle = human and yellow circle = AI)

Easy, right?

Story F.

Okay, how about this?

Question #2 - Which one of these micros was a challenge Runner-Up?

The answer to both questions is the same.

Story F.

If there's been one instance of a Challenge Winner being an AI story it could happen again. Maybe it already has. And I think it indicates there's something that needs to be done to prevent it from occurring.

Before I expand on this I wanted to say a big thank-you to Caroline Craven, Matthew Fromm, Paul Stewart, and Rachel Deeming for letting me feature their pieces here (Stories A-D). If you haven't checked out their Spooky Micros, please take a look!

I'm a big fan of all their work and when I sat down to write this I thought about who probably wrote an awesome Spooky Micro Challenge entry that I didn't see on the winner's list. Matthew Fromm and Rachel Deeming automatically come to mind when I think of microfiction, they both do it so well and I'm always trying to learn from them. Caroline Craven's fiction is always among the most compelling and memorable reads I come across. And Paul Stewart is such a multi-talented writer whose originality is unrivaled.

Story A - "Noxious" by Caroline Craven

Story B - "Participant #7" by Matthew Fromm

Story C - "...Another for the Shadows" by Paul Stewart

Story D - "Salvation of the Skies" by Rachel Deeming

All of these micros are excellent stories crafted by talented writers who always publish content they themselves wrote. And I imagine there were a ton of other Spooky Micros that were written by skilled human authors. All of them are more deserving of a spot on the Challenge Winner list than an AI generated piece.

Story E - "The Other Side of the Door" was written by yours truly.

And here's the Spooky Micro Challenge Winners List if you're interested in checking it out to find Story F.

All the scans above save the one received high confidence ratings for human authorship. And the other one, well, there was a high confidence of AI content. I did leave the first sentence off from all the scans because the opening sentence that all entries had to include was written by Vocal.

I know a lot of people are concerned about the validity of scanners and wary of their work being flagged for AI when it isn't. With good quality scanners, I find that they tend to error on the human side and if the result is inconclusive it will report that to the scanner user as having low confidence in its findings. So you'll get more false negatives (An AI piece that doesn't get flagged) but very few false positives (Human work getting flagged as AI). In other words, if the scanner is highly confident a piece is 100% AI there’s good reason to be certain it’s AI and if you wrote a piece yourself it’s extremely unlikely that your piece would be flagged as AI.

For example I asked ChatGPT to generate a Spooky Micro Entry for me and here was the scan result.

And here's another ChatGPT generated Spooky Micro with some formatting changes and some rephrased portions to make it "more human".

It has an uncertain confidence rating on its classification, which ended up being human even though the story was in fact written by ChatGPT and then tweaked.

I've put quite a few of my pieces through the GPTZero scanner and have never had one flagged for AI. And when I ran the micros of other creators that I know write their own material, no surprises, they were all confirmed as human content.

I think ALL stories selected as challenge winners should be subjected to AI and plagiarism scans. For most Creators it will just be confirmation of their integrity, but it provides a safeguard against those who do try to sneak in AI or stolen content.

And I know some scanners are bad. But the good ones are quite good. As creators, we shouldn't need to concern ourselves with paying for the most advanced AI detectors and plagiarism checkers to verify who's legitimate, but I daresay the Vocal platform should, especially for pieces being awarded Challenge prizes.

I don't think any of us want to compete against AI stories or be on the podium alongside one. Being a challenge winner should be an honor and it certainly doesn't look good for Vocal or us the Vocalites if AI pieces are winning challenges.

It would be wonderful if there was an infallible tool that didn't require any AI itself to detect AI and plagiarism, but until that magical crystal ball finds its way into our dimension, there's not a better way to verify the integrity of a piece. Some readers are really good at detecting AI usage but many aren't, and using human intuition about a piece as the evaluation criteria isn't a reliable method. And it certainly wouldn't be a feasible approach for a platform of Vocal's size or with how many challenge entries there are.

So if you hold the position that AI and plagiarism shouldn't be eligible to win prizes, you have to consider how that could be enforced? I'm a problem and solution oriented person. You kind of have to be as a teacher. If there are other alternatives to scanners, I'd love to hear about them, but at this time I'm convinced they're the best we've got.

I know you're thinking "Isn't this the Vocal Challenge part of the manifesto, not the AI Policy part?" And you're right, but honestly AI is a big issue in so many areas, I can't help but bring some of it up in this piece. But I've said enough for now. I’ll say more on AI, Vocal's AI policy, and the relevant question of false positives in the upcoming Part 5 of this manifesto.

Variety in Challenge Types

When I first joined Vocal it seemed like most of the Challenges were in the poetry or fiction genres. As someone who wrote exclusively fiction and poetry, this was great. I got really excited for each new Challenge to be announced.

Recently it has felt like there are a lot of Challenges that fall into the personal essay category and that there is some intentional effort to host Challenges for a variety of the Vocal Communities.

I was less enthused at first, but I've actually enjoyed participating in many of these different types of Challenges. That being said, I do sense the pendulum swinging too far away from the poetry and fiction realm. April is National Poetry month in the US and the only Challenge that was poetry adjacent was the Harmonic Verse Challenge in the Beat Community.

This could definitely just be a personal preference thing, but if there are going to be about four challenges each month, I'd like to see at least one be fiction and one be poetry.

There are Creators like me who will try just about any Challenge that's put forth, but there are a lot of Creators who exclusively write poetry or fiction and I think it would be good to have at least one Challenge per month in those two pillars of the Vocal platform.

All right that's it from me in regards to Vocal Challenges! As I mentioned in the introduction, I'd love to hear feedback, pushback, and any other remarks you fellow Vocalites might have!

Part 2: The Vocal Leaderboard

Part 4: Vocal Top Stories

Part 5: Vocal AI Policy

Part 6: Conclusion