Consider how a human judges fiction. The emotional resonance of a text, perhaps. When a scene, a phrase, a word transports the reader into new and old experiences.
This can happen slowly or all at once. A recognizable text, or a deeply unfamiliar one, which penetrates through its disparate syllogisms like poetry.
A good human judge of a reputable literary prize should be able to identify these moments. Meaning that he or she should have a wealth of experience to draw from. Moreover, a wealth of literature.
I may appreciate Chekhov's Lady with the Dog because I relate deeply to the banker's malaise. Perhaps I am a banker myself. Or I can recognize that, although this experience is unfamiliar to me, I can assure myself that it is the experience of a human. Assurance which is confirmed by other, human, accounts of a banker's malaise: in history, in literature, in art, in my own personal testimony of infidelity and bureaucracy.
As a thought experiment, remove the human for a moment. Position yourself as a dog. The Lady's dog: a silent witness to the unfolding of the drama, yet a central narrative figure. Imagine your dog brain suddenly attained an infinite capacity to learn commands, to associate language, images, and memories with the entire corpus of human signifiers.
What would this little dog say about Dmitri the banker? Well, it might say the following: "His interiority is vivid and contradictory in deeply human ways: his simultaneous attraction to and contempt for women, his self-awareness of his own duplicity, his surprise at his own emotional development." (anthropic/claude-sonnet-4, Character Specialist, 95% confidence, 10.5k tokens).
There is no world in which the dog writes Chekhov's story. It is a witness, an arbiter, a judge. The interplay of its existence between the narrative dilemmas and the fictive world in which it inhabits is the point. The dog cannot be Chekhov, the storyteller, the human. But what is Chekhov without his little dog? Who is the Lady? Can the omniscient dog not help us to understand a little more about our lives, and our capacity to produce great work?
The Moreno Prize is the first literary prize awarded entirely by artificial intelligence.