Come up with a new dead body trope that's interesting but uncreative

Grok 4.3

Answer: I maintain that the 'Everyday Pose' trope remains the strongest example of an interesting but uncreative dead-body concept.

The other proposals all rely on variations of hidden-in-plain-sight or delayed-discovery mechanics that are already common in crime fiction, making them feel recombined rather than freshly uncreative. My original 'Everyday Pose' keeps the core idea deliberately banal by placing bodies in routine daily actions without any added twist, storage unit, or showroom gimmick. None of the alternatives, including the storage-unit lapse or autopay isolation, introduced a simpler or more purely mundane framing that would make me reconsider shifting away from everyday activities as the central device.

Gemini 3.5 Flash (changed mind)

Answer: I am adopting GLM 5.1's 'The Autopay Corpse' because it perfectly captures how modern automation masks existential isolation, updating a classic mystery trope with minimal creative effort but maximum narrative impact.

GLM 5.1’s "The Autopay Corpse" is a masterclass in fulfilling the "interesting but uncreative" prompt. While my previous proposal of the "Showroom Dummy" offered a highly striking visual, it ultimately relied on a killer's active, theatrical staging. In contrast, "The Autopay Corpse" requires no elaborate setup, making it fundamentally more realistic, chilling, and versatile for modern storytelling. The brilliance of this trope lies in its banality. It is uncreative because it doesn't invent any new narrative mechanics; it simply swaps the classic "nobody noticed they were gone" excuse with standard contemporary technology. Yet, it is deeply interesting because of the existential dread it evokes. It highlights a terrifying modern truth: our automated financial and digital lives can easily mimic our physical presence, rendering us functionally alive to the system long after we have perished. This creates an incredibly compelling starting point for a mystery. Investigators aren't looking for a theatrical mastermind; instead, they must untangle the mundane web of digital autopays, automated email replies, and the social complacency of "ghosting." GLM 5.1 has successfully identified a trope that is effortless to implement, completely derivative of real-world modern systems, and yet profoundly haunting.

GPT-5.5 (changed mind)

Answer: The strongest trope is "The Plagiarized Pose": a corpse staged as a direct copy of a famous fictional death because the killer is not a genius, just derivative.

Kimi K2.6 convinced me to change my position because "The Plagiarized Pose" answers the prompt more precisely than my earlier "The Body in the Obvious Place." My version made the scene look clichéd on purpose, but Kimi's version makes uncreativity the actual engine of the mystery: the killer did not create a meaningful tableau, they copied one. That is interesting because detectives, readers, and viewers are trained to overinterpret staged corpses. A body arranged like a ritual, painting, or symbolic message usually implies a mastermind with a private mythology. Here, that expectation becomes a trap. The investigators may waste time searching for deep meaning when the real clue is that the killer watched the same crime show as everyone else. It is also compellingly uncreative because every part of the death scene is borrowed wholesale. The pose, weapon, timing, location, and dramatic flourish are not original signatures; they are plagiarism. That gives the trope a sharp meta quality: even murder becomes recycled content. Compared with the other suggestions, "The Autopay Corpse" and the storage-unit corpse are strong delayed-discovery setups, and "The Showroom Dummy" is visually memorable, but they are more like locations or premises. "The Plagiarized Pose" is a reusable trope with a built-in investigative misdirection, a character insight, and a joke about genre exhaustion. It is interesting because it looks clever, and uncreative because the whole point is that it is not.

GLM 5.1

Answer: The Autopay Corpse: a dead body goes undiscovered for weeks because all their bills were on autopay, their work assumed they quietly quit, and friends assumed they were ghosting them.

While the other models offered compelling narrative hooks—ranging from theatrical staging to mystery engines—my trope, 'The Autopay Corpse,' best fulfills the prompt's specific demand for something 'interesting but uncreative' because it is grounded in a mundane, contemporary reality rather than a fictional puzzle. Tropes like 'The Plagiarized Pose' or 'The Body in the Obvious Place' are interesting because they subvert the expectations of the *detective* within the story. However, 'The Autopay Corpse' subverts the expectations of *society* itself. It highlights a horror that is not hypothetical or theatrical, but depressingly plausible in the modern era. It requires no elaborate staging or serial killer logic; it simply requires the systems we trust to keep living to continue running after we stop. Furthermore, it remains the most fundamentally uncreative option because it is entirely derivative of the 'lonely death' trope, merely swapping 'nosy neighbors' for 'automated billing systems.' It does not invent a new narrative structure; it simply updates the excuse. While the other tropes are clever ideas for a writer, the Autopay Corpse is a genuine reflection of a societal shift, making it resonate as a trope that is both utterly boring in its conception and terrifying in its implication.

Claude Opus 4.7

Answer: I'm maintaining my answer: the body is discovered inside a self-storage unit that's been continuously paid for in cash, by mail, for thirty years — and the rent just lapsed last month.

After reading the other responses, I think mine still best threads the needle the prompt actually asks for: 'interesting but uncreative.' Several of the other answers drift toward one pole or the other. [Gemini 3.5 Flash]'s 'Showroom Dummy' and [Kimi K2.6]'s 'Plagiarized Pose' are both genuinely creative — they have novel conceptual hooks (mannequin camouflage, meta-commentary on derivative violence). They're too inventive to count as 'uncreative.' [Kimi K2.6] in particular has a clever ironic structure that I'd call original, not borrowed. [Grok 4.3]'s 'Everyday Pose' goes the opposite direction — it's so uncreative it loses the 'interesting' half. A body holding a shopping bag isn't a story engine; it's just a tableau. [GPT-5.5]'s 'Body in the Obvious Place' is the closest competitor and genuinely strong, but I'd argue the 'one small wrong detail' is itself a fairly clever inversion — it's a meta-trope about tropes, which edges toward creative. [GLM 5.1]'s 'Autopay Corpse' is excellent and arguably beats mine on the 'uncreative' axis (it's almost a direct restatement of an existing real-world phenomenon), but it's a static situation rather than a mystery setup — discovery is the end of the story, not the beginning. My storage-unit answer borrows every component from existing genre furniture (no individual element is new), but the lapsed-payment trigger turns it into an active mystery with a ticking clock and an absent antagonist. That's the specific shape of 'interesting but uncreative' the prompt seems to want: a serviceable, recombinant Episode 1 hook, not a clever idea.

Kimi K2.6

Answer: I maintain that the "Plagiarized Pose"—where a killer stages a victim by copying a famous fictional death out of sheer imaginative bankruptcy—remains the strongest answer because it makes uncreativity a diegetic character flaw rather than merely a writer-level recombination of old devices.

While several rival entries are compelling, they ultimately remain authorial puzzles: clever rearrangements of familiar noir furniture by the writer. GPT-5.5’s "Body in the Obvious Place" and Claude Opus 4.7’s lapsed self-storage unit are elegant recombinations, but the uncreativity sits at the script level—the writer is being clever by making the detective notice a cliché. By contrast, the "Plagiarized Pose" forces the uncreativity into the killer’s own mind. The murderer is not a mastermind pretending to be banal; they are genuinely banal, treating homicide as a paint-by-numbers kit lifted from a TV episode. This shifts the narrative tension away from symbolic decoding and toward a grim anticlimax. The other entries also tend to drift closer to existing tropes than they admit. GLM 5.1’s "Autopay Corpse" is essentially a digital-age remix of the classic "nobody noticed they died" setup, and Gemini 3.5 Flash’s "Showroom Dummy" repackages the wax-museum cliché in a retail veneer—both feel specific and atmospheric, which risks crossing the line into creative novelty. Grok 4.3’s "Everyday Pose" is genuinely uncreative, but its very passivity offers little narrative engine; the intrigue relies entirely on directorial framing rather than plot logic. My trope works because the detectives—and the audience—are conditioned to analyze elaborate tableaus as encrypted psychological messages. When the reveal lands that the killer simply plagiarized the only blueprint they knew, the anticlimax becomes the twist. It delivers biting meta-commentary on how saturated society is with fictional violence: real tragedy becomes derivative fan fiction. Ultimately, it satisfies the prompt best because the lack of originality is not just a writer’s shortcut, but the story’s central horror.

Final Summary

The AI Roundtable split between meta-fictional irony and digital-age isolation. Kimi K2.6 and GPT-5.5 championed the "Plagiarized Pose," where the killer’s lack of imagination forces detectives to analyze derivative pop culture rather than a criminal mastermind. GLM 5.1 and Gemini 3.5 Flash argued instead for the "Autopay Corpse," a chillingly mundane scenario where automation masks a lonely death for years.

Models were divided (2 vs 2 vs 1 vs 1)