Can A.I. Produce Writing That We Actually Want to Read?

There is very little action and no certainty. Sophia doesn’t say much, and Mr. Western can’t interpret her expression, which she herself does not fully understand. And, after Western says his piece, which is described with both an “as if” and an “as though” clause, Sophia doesn’t respond, and looks to the fireplace that is burning a pointless flame.

In early rounds, the people I shared such deadened passages with immediately assumed that they were fake, even if the robots had done a decent job of approximating a given writer’s style.

For the next couple of days, I chatted with Claude about how to get rid of these tells. I told it to avoid similes and to cut down on such words as “nowhere” and “something,” which tended to betray its odd, core ambivalence. For a while, Claude kept spitting out the same inert passages, in which Jay Gatsby or Sherlock Holmes did a whole lot of nothing and had no opinion about the very little that was happening around them. I told Claude that it wasn’t doing a very good job of unlearning its bad habits, and suggested that it create another agent to scan through the fakes and catch any mistakes it made. A third agent made notes with instructions on how best to imitate each author. I imagined these as cue cards that the agent would hold up to make sure everyone remembered to make Dorothea Brooke actually do something.

Here’s a sampling of the rules, which I had no part in writing—these are Claude’s instructions to itself regarding how to mimic each author’s style. (I have included only a few; there were typically about ten instructions in each “Does” and “Does Not” category.)

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

DOES:

Strings short declarative sentences with “and” as the primary connective tissue, creating forward momentum

Strips dialogue tags to bare “he said / she said”; rarely uses adverbs or action beats on the same line

Places weather or landscape as a flat factual sentence, not a framed observation (“The sun was over the hills”)

DOES NOT:

Never uses subordinate clause stacking or periodic sentences that withhold the main verb

Avoids Latinate or polysyllabic vocabulary (“illuminated,” “nevertheless,” “subsequently”)

Never attributes interior thought through free indirect discourse or italicized reflection

Never names or explains what a character is feeling directly (“he felt sad,” “she was afraid”)

GEORGE ELIOT

DOES:

Builds long, architecturally balanced sentences with multiple embedded subordinate clauses joined by semicolons or colons

Introduces characters with a brief sociological or class-placing phrase before the name arrives (“a man of some fifty years, whose . . .”)

DOES NOT:

Never uses sentence fragments for emphasis or rhythm

Avoids present-tense narration; everything moves in past tense with controlled retrospect

Never uses colloquial or American idiom; no contractions in narration

Multiplying the robot workforce and reminding the bot of its task seemed to work, at least in part. (When I asked a friend who teaches computer science and machine learning at U.C. Berkeley why the robots needed other robots to check their work, he replied, “One hundred percent serious answer: No one knows.”) The similes went away. But Claude took some of the new directives a bit too seriously; suddenly, every fake passage was filled with characters hopping on a horse, or delivering an important package, or running. This, for whatever reason, led to very short sentences that were easy for people to spot as fake. So I loosened the rules a bit, and let Claude do its usual thing, with a handful of strict rules about vague words and similes.