The Method · Long Read
Hemingway's Writing Style, as Faked by Five AI Models
Four classics, one station scene, twenty paragraphs of machine prose, and not a single real voice
TL;DR: The words were there. The authors weren't. ?? We all have a rough idea of how large language models work. One thing follows from how they're built: they are brilliant at choosing words; strictly speaking, that's all they do. Imitating the style of an author the model knows inside out, one it trained on extensively, is a perfect way to gauge what it can effectively do, what it can barely do, and what it simply cannot do at all. We asked five flagships — Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.5, Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8, and DeepSeek V4 — to write one paragraph each in the styles of four great writers, familiar to both models and readers alike: Hemingway, Edgar Poe, McCarthy, and Faulkner. The pr
Read more →Latest
All recent →The Power Is Yours… Sort Of: AI Writing and the Environment
Do you have to apologize to Recycle Rex every time you ask an LLM for a hand with your writing? Here are some tips to reduce your impact
Abbot Trithemius, 1492: Anyone Who Asks Why We Must Still Copy by Hand Is Concealing His Own Sloth
Texts grow cheap, professions die, writers go slack: how we have spent the past five hundred years
Anthropic Is Watermarking Every Text It Touches. It Isn't for You
Labeling AI content works. Just not the way you think, and not where it actually matters
Too Hot, Too Cold, and Just Right: Why AI Picked Up the Rule of Three and How Humans Can Deal With That
Groups of three come from basic geometry and human perception, so it's natural for AI to incorporate them — but telling the difference may be as simple as one plus one
Masterwork or Mass Product?
Curators demand originality; digital platforms try to filter content. The new art ignores these boundaries and is taking shape spontaneously in social media feeds
AI Is Great at Scaring Us. Can It Make Us Laugh?
We asked several flagship AI models to joke about themselves. The results weren't always funny — but they were always interesting
- 01 ——
The Craft
10 pieces Writing as craft — voice, style, editing, long-form.Column · 9 min Abbot Trithemius, 1492: Anyone Who Asks Why We Must Still Copy by Hand Is Concealing His Own Sloth Column · 4 min Too Hot, Too Cold, and Just Right: Why AI Picked Up the Rule of Three and How Humans Can Deal With That Long Read · 10 min The Em Dash: A History of a Mark Nobody Used — Until Everyone Did - 02 ——
The Machine
13 pieces How AI works and where it breaks — memory, context, hallucinations. - 03 ——
The Method
10 pieces Working with AI — prompts, workflows, roles, Deep Research. - 04 ——
The Desk
5 pieces The writer's working environment — editor, sources, focus, tools. - 05 ——
The Stack
13 pieces Models, tools, pricing, market — Claude vs GPT, BYOK, industry shifts.
