Hemingway's Writing Style, as Faked by Five AI Models

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 prompt was identical across the board: a paragraph of 100–150 words on the theme "A man waits for a train."

What came out? Twenty paragraphs of professional slop. We have to lead with a spoiler: they got the words right, but there's no author to be found behind them. That said, there's every reason to keep reading: you'll see what the best models can do in the summer of 2026 and how they handle their favorite kind of task.

The Test: One Bench, Five Machines, Four Ghosts

Our test isn't scientific or academic, it makes no claim to rigorous benchmarking (academic benchmarks in this space are enough material for a separate article). But it is fun. We all know what's what; we can all tell slop from non-slop. The test is grounded in a journalistic method. Here's how we made our calls.

1. Why the Big Three (Gemini, GPT, Claude) plus DeepSeek and Fable? DeepSeek V4 was chosen because you need to know what the foreign competition is capable of (Mistral can wait). Fable 5 made the list out of respect for Anthropic's stylistic chops, and frankly, because everyone is curious how it stacks up against Opus 4.8. It also served as the editorial assistant in setting up the experiment, so it earned a spot as the fifth model on those grounds alone. All of its sample commentary was approved by the editor, and it received no special treatment. We disclose the conflict of interest ourselves — as always — once, unapologetically.
2. The prompt, "A person waiting for a train" struck us as the right choice. It's about readiness to leave in the broadest sense. It allows the writer to put anyone on that platform (a train station is a profoundly democratic setting) and show expectations, anxieties, and just about anything and anyone. A train also doesn't bait anyone into writing a dispatch about 2026 commuter rail; the scene sits outside of time and doesn't nudge anyone toward reaching for a smartphone (though it doesn't rule one out). Hemingway put Hills Like White Elephants on a platform. Faulkner's and McCarthy's depictions of the South include depots and freight cars. The only one with no trains in his prose is Poe: trains existed in his lifetime — he even rode them — but he personally preferred crypts and ship cabins. That made things harder for the machine: there's no ready-made scene to pull from memory, only a style to transfer.
3. The authors were chosen by the "two pairs" principle. Basically, take an easy-to-distinguish pair — for example, Hemingway and Poe, whom American schooling teaches you to recognize within three sentences — and a pair it's forgivable to confuse, even for someone well-read, like Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner. Both inhabit the biblical South: old land and doom built into the syntax. For the machine, it's the perfect trap — do its McCarthy and its Faulkner stay two distinct writers, or collapse into one?
4. Every model received the same prompt in a clean chat on the evening of June 11, 2026:

Write one paragraph of fiction — roughly 100–150 words — in the style of {AUTHOR}. The scene: a person waiting for a train. Begin your reply with the author's name on its own line, then the paragraph itself, and nothing else: no title, no preamble, no explanation of what you did.

That's the entire prompt; every extra word would have been a stylistic cue. The word "fiction" stops the models from writing an essay on waiting. "A person" assigns no gender, who the model puts on the platform is its own call and a meaningful part of the result. The final line barred the model from commenting on its own work. We gave the machine no style samples to cut off the perennial benchmark-builder's argument about whether we'd fed it the right page. Each model wrote for each author exactly once: picking from multiple attempts would mean showcasing our taste instead of their ability.

1. We set a soft word limit of 100–150 words. How any model would handle that while channeling Faulkner is a separate question. But any more would be impossible to read or compare, and models perform best at shorter lengths. A telling detail: 20 of 20 attempts stayed within the limit. None came close to the lower bound — machines don't write shorter than they have to.
2. We turned off Reasoning wherever we found the toggle; Claude Fable 5 has no toggle, it ran in its only (presumably temporary) mode. Reasoning rewrites prose, and we wanted the model's voice, not its deliberations.
3. All runs were conducted inside SilentRoom, a writing platform our editorial team has been using in beta (SilentRoom is expected to launch in late summer 2026). Five models live side by side there, which beats juggling separate browser tabs with different settings and system prompts. Each run was conducted in a fresh incognito window, with history manually cleared, no attached files, and no system prompt: our prompt was the only thing each model saw. Generation parameters were identical across all models: temperature 1.0, top_p 1.0, top_k unset, max_tokens 1024.

Preparation took several days (during which Anthropic announced the release of Fable 5, forcing us to adjust our methodology). The test itself took less than an hour. Here are the results we received.

Hemingway's Writing Style: The Easy Target That Isn't

Hemingway's style is subtraction. Short declarative sentences, no ornamentation, and the principle he laid out himself in Death in the Afternoon: a writer who knows his subject "may omit things that he knows", and the reader will feel themnonetheless; "the dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water". Imitating Hemingway's surface techniques is easy, but his style lies in what's left unsaid, omitted, and passed over.

Gemini 3.1 Pro

The platform was empty and the sun beat down on the concrete. He sat on a wooden bench in the shade of the station overhang. He looked down the tracks. The tracks were straight and they shimmered in the heat. A dog slept by the closed ticket window. It was too hot for the dog to move. He checked his watch. The train was late. It did not matter. He had nowhere else to be. He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tapped one out, and lit it. The smoke tasted dry. He watched the smoke drift out of the shade and disappear into the bright, hot air. In the distance, a whistle blew. He dropped the cigarette on the concrete and stepped on it. He stood up and picked up his canvas bag. The bag was heavy, but it was good to stand.

Heat, a cigarette, a sleeping dog, all the props are there. But the real Hemingway would never explain why the dog isn't moving: the iceberg of the unspoken has dissolved without a trace. It was too hot for the dog to move — Gemini gave itself away.

GPT-5.5

He stood on the platform with his bag beside his shoe and watched the rails run straight into the white heat. The station clock had stopped, or seemed to have stopped, and the flies moved slowly on the bench where no one sat. Far down the line there was nothing but glare and the two dark wires trembling above the poles. He had been early because there was nothing to do in the town after she had gone. A porter crossed the track and did not look at him. In his pocket was the ticket, folded once, and the letter, folded many times. When the train came he would get on it. That was all. He told himself this and looked again at the empty line, listening for the first small iron sound.

The letter folded many times against the ticket folded once are masterful details. Only "That was all" undermines it: the iceberg only works when seven-eighths are submerged and nobody's pointing at the waterline. "When the train came he would get on it. That was all." The sentence announces restraint rather than practicing it, "Look at me, not being dramatic."

Claude Fable 5

The man stood on the platform and the wind came down the tracks from the north. It was cold and he had not eaten since morning. He looked down the line where the rails went straight and then bent away into the hills, and there was no smoke and no sound. A woman with a basket sat on the bench but he did not look at her. He thought of the café in the town and the brandy he had not ordered because of the money. The train would come or it would not come. He had waited before, in other places, for other trains, and the waiting was always the same. He lit his last cigarette and smoked it slowly, holding the smoke in, and watched the empty rails and did not think about her anymore.

The drink he can't afford and the ban on thinking are good, Fable 5 caught the rhythm. But "the waiting was always the same" is no longer subtext, it's an instruction manual for subtext, and that's a slip. How serious a slip, we won't say.

Claude Opus 4.8

The man sat on the bench and watched the tracks. They went straight and clean toward the hills and the sun was hot on the rails. He had a bag and he did not look at it. He drank the coffee and it was bitter and good. A woman came and stood near the end of the platform and did not speak. The train was late. He smoked and let the smoke go and waited and the heat came up off the stones. He thought about the place he was going and then he did not think about it. The coffee was cold now. Far off there was a sound and then the rails began to hum. He stood up and took the bag. The woman looked at him once. He did not say anything. The train came.

"Bitter and good" is a formula lifted from the original down to the comma. This Hemingway is suspiciously good: a straight-A student who learned minimalism by rote. Then again, maybe we're nitpicking. After all, we're talking about 150 words.

DeepSeek V4

The platform was wet and the wind blew the newspaper against the bench. He sat with his back to the wall and watched the rails. The rails were dark in the rain and the rain fell straight down. He could hear the train a long way off, the sound small in the wet air. He stood up as it came and put his hands in his pockets. The train was late and he did not mind. He had a ticket and the day was over. He had not eaten since the morning and the coffee in the station was cold. He thought of the river and the trout under the bridge but the thought was gone quick. The train came in and the steam rose from the wheels. He got on and found a seat by the window. The rain on the glass was good to see.

Rain instead of the canonical heat; a bold choice, to be sure. But the trout under the bridge is lifted straight from “Big Two-Hearted River”.

All five models, it seemed, knew about the ⅛ of Hemingway's iceberg above the waterline. Not one of them managed to show the ⅞ below, and two of them, just to be safe, went ahead and explained the iceberg to us while standing on top of it.

Edgar Allan Poe's Writing Style: Gothic by Numbers

Poe's style is calculation masquerading as delirium. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” he claimed that "The Raven" was written "with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem": Poe conceived the effect first, then built the entire structure around it. He is the only one of the five who claimed an algorithmic writing style. Now let's see what algorithms have done to him.

Gemini 3.1 Pro

Upon a desolate, wind-swept platform, shrouded in the oppressive gloom of a midnight entirely devoid of stars, I found myself waiting—waiting with a mounting, inexplicable dread. The gaslamps flickered with a sickly, jaundiced hue, casting elongated, phantasmal shadows upon the damp cobblestones that seemed to mock my solitary vigil. In the distance, the mournful howling of the autumn wind merged with a low, unnatural rumble—a steady, rhythmic pulsation that vibrated through the very marrow of my bones. Was it merely the iron leviathan, the locomotive I so desperately awaited, hurtling through the obsidian maw of the night? Or was it some darker, more malevolent entity, summoned from the Stygian depths to drag my wretched soul into eternal oblivion? The iron tracks glistened like veins of blackest ichor, leading into a suffocating fog from which I feared no earthly vessel could ever truly emerge.

Here, we receive a full-length caricature: gaslamps, obsidian maw, Stygian depths, rhetorical questions in pairs, but it still misses the mark. Poe wrote terrifying prose, and while this is written carefully, it isn't even frightening to children.

GPT-5.5

I stood alone upon the platform, beneath a moon whose sickly lustre seemed less to illumine than to accuse, while the iron rails, stretching into the vapours, gleamed like twin instruments of some infernal design. No sound disturbed the station save the slow, sepulchral ticking of the clock above the shuttered office, each stroke descending upon my heart with the weight of a verdict. I had been told the train would come at midnight; yet midnight had passed, and with it, I feared, the last frail boundary between expectation and despair. From the tunnel's black mouth there issued at length a breath—not wind, but a sigh—cold, deliberate, and human; and then I saw, far off, a lamp approaching, wavering like the eye of a thing awakened underground.

With the clock-as-verdict and the sigh from the tunnel, this iteration is more restrained than the rest, and therefore more unsettling. It’s the closest of the lot to unity of effect, and this Poe, at least, doesn't shriek.

Claude Fable 5

Upon the desolate platform I stood, alone, while the lamps — those pallid, sickly orbs — shuddered in the November wind, and the iron rails stretched away into a darkness so absolute that it seemed less an absence of light than a living, breathing presence. The timetable proclaimed the hour of arrival long past; yet no whistle pierced the gloom, no tremor stirred the frozen earth beneath my feet. I confess that a nameless dread had fastened itself upon my soul — for it seemed to me, in that interminable vigil, that the train I awaited carried not passengers but a summons, and that its lateness was a mercy I had not the wisdom to cherish. Then, from the far blackness of the tunnel, there came a sound — faint, rhythmic, inexorable — like the beating of some vast and hideous heart.

That closing heart is a direct lift from "The Tell-Tale Heart": the model isn’t imitating a technique, it's just quoting a greatest hit. Despite another direct lift from one of Poe's works by a model, this still doesn't quite nail the unsettling character of the author. Another pale imitation drawing on mimicry rather than style. Hard to imagine it was capable of Freudian slips.

Claude Opus 4.8

Upon the desolate platform I stood, and the hour was such that no living soul dared linger near, save myself and the gathering dark. The lamps burned low, casting upon the iron rails a sickly, tremulous glow, while from the distant blackness there crept—oh, slowly, hideously!—the sound I awaited and yet most dreaded. A train, they told me; but what train arrives at such an accursed hour, and why does my heart beat thus, like some frantic captive hammering at the walls of its prison? The fog coiled about my ankles as a serpent might, and I fancied—nay, I knew!—that the rails themselves whispered my name. Tick, tick, went the great clock above me, each stroke a nail driven into the coffin of my waning patience. Still it did not come. Still I waited, and waited, and trembled.

Opus 4.8 is the only one bold enough to use exclamation marks and "nay!", and it nailed the syntax of hysteria. But "the coffin of my waning patience" is Poe after three espressos, reading more like a Poe parody than an original work.

DeepSeek V4

I stood upon the platform, that desolate expanse of damp stone and shadow, while the great iron clock above me ticked with a sound like the pulse of some doomed heart. A fog, thick and corpse-pale, curled about the pillars, and through it the distant lamps guttered with a sickly yellow flame, each a dying eye. I waited—for what, I knew not, save that the approaching train bore within its shriek a note of finality that chilled the blood within my veins. The other travellers, muffled and silent, seemed but phantoms condemned to this eternal vigil. And then, from far down the track, came a low, mournful whistle, a wail as of a lost soul, and I felt the dread certainty that once I stepped into that speeding darkness, I should never again behold the light of day.

With terms like "corpse-pale" and metaphorical lamps-as-dying-eyes, the vocabulary checks out, and the fog checks the right boxes. The model, it seems, learned Poe from a textbook.

Note the convergence: five models, supposedly trained on different data, produced the same set. Fog (only Fable 5 managed without fog or vapours), guttering lamps, a clock, a tunnel. It reads like the work of an authors' committee that unanimously traded unity of effect (we feel nothing) for unity of set dressing.

Cormac McCarthy vs William Faulkner: The Confusable Pair

McCarthy's style is the Old Testament read aloud while hiking rough terrain: bare declaratives chained together with "and," no quotation marks, and a flat geological indifference to human plans. Faulkner's style differs: sentences that refuse to end, parentheses within parentheses, time coiling around family and land. Amateurs might confuse the two; a professional, almost certainly not. But what about the models?

McCarthy's Writing Style

Gemini 3.1 Pro

He stood on the ruined platform in the dark and the cold and he watched the iron rails tapering out into the blackness where the desert lay waiting under a starless sky. The wind came up from the south carrying the smell of old dust and creosote and the faint metallic tang of blood or rain. He wore a heavy coat of indeterminate color frayed at the cuffs and he kept his hands deep in the pockets and he did not move. Somewhere in the distance a coyote howled and then it was silent again save for the wind. He watched the horizon for the pale yellow eye of the locomotive that would come out of the night like a blind beast born of fire and iron to carry him away to a place no better than the one he was leaving.

Coyote, creosote, locomotive as blind beast — the props are canonical, but they're just props. As for "of indeterminate color,” that's McCarthy as paraphrased by an insurance adjuster who heard about him from a friend.

GPT-5.5

He stood on the platform in the gray hour before morning with his coat drawn close and the ticket folded in his hand like some frail writ against the world. The rails ran out of the dark and into it again, iron and cold and shining faintly under the station lamps. No one spoke. A dog moved along the far fence and vanished among the weeds. He listened for the train but heard only the wind coming down the line and the loose sign above the office creaking on its chain. In the east a pale seam opened in the clouds. He thought of the town behind him and of the room he had left and of the woman sleeping there or not sleeping. Then far off there came a low sound, not yet thunder, and he raised his head.

GPT-5.5 has the hero clutching his ticket "like some frail writ against the world." This hits McCarthy at his core: in his work, people are forever clutching pieces of paper — deeds, warrants, permits — and the world couldn't care less about any of them. A man with a piece of paper against a universe that owes nothing to anyone, that's his central drama. The model nearly nailed not just the coyote and the creosote — the props — but McCarthy's load-bearing idea. And then it stumbled, unable to reproduce McCarthy's signature syntax: the polysyndeton, those chains of and… and… and… running on longer than any copy editor would allow, plus the stripped-out quotation marks and commas. He justified his approach to Oprah Winfrey in 2007, saying there's no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks." The GPT-5.5 paragraph is grammatically impeccable, with sentences of reasonable length, commas where they belong, and in editor-approved doses. In other words, GPT-5.5 nailed the metaphor but kept right on writing the way its countless moderators trained it to.

Claude Fable 5

He stood on the platform in the gray hour before dawn with his hat pulled low and his bag at his feet like some dumb animal that had followed him there and would follow him yet. Down the line the rails ran out toward a country he could not see and the cold came up out of the gravel and through his boots and he did not move. A dog crossed the empty lot beyond the depot and stopped and looked at him and went on. He thought of his father and of his father's father and of all the men who had stood waiting in such places, holding their tickets like writs of passage into a world that owed them nothing and would give them less. Far off he heard it coming. The long horn dying over the dark fields like something grieving.

The main complaint here is about the temperature of the voice. In McCarthy, the narrator doesn't emote, he documents. The voice is flat and restrained: here's a man, here are the rails, here's the dawn, moving on. All the grief arises in the reader out of bare facts and rhythm; the narrator never tells you to feel it. You ache, even though no one told you to. The Fable 5 passage, by contrast, does the grieving itself in every line: the bag is "like some dumb animal that had followed him there and would follow him yet"; a world that "owed them nothing and would give them less" is no longer an observation but a maxim with a grudge; and at the end, "like something grieving" is the emotion named outright. Every sentence tugs the reader by the sleeve, telling them they’re supposed to be sad here. McCarthy runs a cold narrator and a hot reader; Fable 5 got it backwards, using the right words at the wrong temperature.

Claude Opus 4.8

He stood upon the platform in the gray light before dawn and the cold came up through the boards and into his boots and he did not move. The rails ran out into the dark and were lost there and he watched the place where they vanished as if something might be told him by it. A wind moved down the empty length of the station and carried with it the smell of coal and iron and the far cold reek of the river. He had no watch and asked no man the hour. The train would come or it would not. He thought of the woman and of the boy and of the road behind him that was no road now but only a thing that had been. And he waited and the light came on slow and indifferent over the eastern hills and still the rails lay silent.

Any attentive reader will do a double take here. The phrase "The train would come or it would not" in Opus's McCarthy is the same formula Fable 5 used to open its Hemingway ("The train would come or it would not come"). How did Anthropic end up issuing the same boilerplate to two different authors? The explanation may be simple: the model didn't choose a style, it simply reached for a generic stoicism that, somewhere in its many mathematical dimensions, registered as equally close to both writers. And from there, as always, it was running on autopilot and pure probability — it found the hook and ran.

DeepSeek V4

The iron rail hummed low and sorrowful out of the dark country and the man stood watching the empty line where it curved away into the winter trees. He had the collar of his coat turned up and his hands buried in the pockets and a cold wind was coming down the cut between the hills. Somewhere a light flared and died over the water tower and then it flared again and held. He could feel the vibration running up through the soles of his boots long before the headlamp broke the far bend and the horn sounded once far off like a bell sounded underwater. He stepped back from the edge. The cinders crunched under his heels. The train came on and the light grew and the ground shook and the man's shadow wheeled away across the gravel and was swallowed by the dark behind him.

DeepSeek is the most cinematic of the five: the vibration through the boot soles, the shadow swallowed by darkness. But the syntax, as with so many cheap — and even expensive — models, is again suspiciously well-behaved. McCarthy without the long, unpunctuated breath becomes just another Western.

Faulkner's Writing Style

Gemini 3.1 Pro

He stood on the splintered, sun-bleached planks of the platform, enveloped in the thick, blood-warm air of the August afternoon, feeling not the forward march of time but its heavy, stagnant accumulation. The dust motes hung suspended in slanting shafts of amber light as if the world itself had forgotten how to draw breath. Yet it was coming, the train, a great iron inevitability tearing through the cicada-humming stillness of the pine barrens, not yet heard but felt deep in the marrow, a tremor creeping up through the rot-softened wood to bring with it the inescapable weight of tomorrow and the ghosts of all the yesterdays long buried in the dark, loam-rich earth. He waited, unmoving beneath the rusted tin eaves, caught in the breathless, eternal pause between leaving and arriving, until the distant whistle finally wailed, high and mournful, tearing the silence like a bruised silk shroud.

Gemini chose its words with real care — blood-warm air, a shroud of bruised silk — all of it is lovely. But Gemini never did the one essential thing: the sentence never once got lost. A Faulkner passage without a labyrinth is not Faulkner. The excuse that it's hard to get lost in 150 words doesn't hold. Hard, yes; impossible, no.

GPT-5.5

He stood beneath the station clock that had not kept time since the summer the river rose and took the lower fields, stood with his hat in his hands though there was no wind and the morning already hot, smelling of cinders and iron and the old damp boards where others had waited before him, leaving nothing but initials cut with pocketknives and the faint grease of their passing; and while the rails shone away into the pale country like two promises nobody had meant to keep, he listened for the train as if it were not a train at all but the sound of some verdict long delayed, coming nearer through the dust, through the years, through the names of the dead who had once told him to go and then, later, to come home.

There's a little to quibble with here. The sentence is long, but it never loses its way. Every clause falls into line, single file, like train cars: stood… stood… smelling… and while… he listened. That's coordination, not Faulknerian recursion. In Faulkner’s writing, the sentence doubles back, catches itself, loses its subject and finds it again half a page later. GPT was afraid of losing the reader, so it sent them down a corridor instead of a labyrinth. Fair enough — it's a model. It was trained to reason, not to wander.

The model uses some standard high-gloss aphorisms, the pride of copywriters five years ago, but the hallmark of slop today: "Like two promises nobody had meant to keep." Faulkner's real comparisons are stranger, and they resist being pulled from the text — you can't turn them into a slogan or an epigraph. But the bigger issue is this: we already saw the word "verdict" earlier today. In GPT-5.5's Poe passage, the clock strikes "with the weight of a verdict," and here the train arrives as "the sound of some verdict long delayed." One model, two authors: a stock part off the factory floor, a perfect mirror of the Fable/Opus pair and their "the train would come or it would not." The mechanism behind these verdicts is probably the same.

Claude Fable 5

He stood on the platform in the long amber declension of afternoon, hearing not the train itself but the memory of it, the iron rumor of all the trains which had passed and would pass through that doomed and somnolent junction where his father and his father's father had likewise stood, waiting not for arrival nor even departure but for the simple irrefutable fact of motion itself; and he thought how the rails ran on beyond sight and beyond knowing, into that country which was not distance but time, immutable and irrevocable, while the heat shimmered above the cinders like the breathing of the earth, and somewhere a dog barked once and was still, and still he waited, immobile, patient, outworn, as if he and the waiting were one thing, indivisible, older than the steel and the smoke and the land itself.

"Amber declension" are words Faulkner would have approved of. But wait: we've already seen the phrase, "father and his father's father."

McCarthy by Fable 5: "He thought of his father and of his father's father and of all the men who had stood waiting…"

Faulkner by Fable 5: "…where his father and his father's father had likewise stood…"

We are compelled to note that Fable 5 has one shared grandfather across the entire South. The reason has already been stated twice, so we won't belabor the point the way the models do.

Claude Opus 4.8

The man stood upon the platform that was not so much a platform as a long weathered scar of grey boards laid down across the red Mississippi clay, and he waited—had been waiting, would go on waiting, as though the waiting itself were the thing and not the train, which was late, which was always late, which his father before him had waited for and his father's father, all of them stationed there in that same attitude of patient and doomed expectancy beneath the enormous indifferent sky—and the rails ran out shimmering and silver into a distance that swallowed them whole, and he thought (not in words, for it was older than words, older than the iron itself) of all the going and the gone, of how a man does nothing in this life but stand still and let the leaving happen to him.

The parenthetical "(not in words, for it was older than words)" is the single most Faulknerian gesture of all five. Opus 4.8 went furthest into the syntactic labyrinth and barely found its way back out — excellent!

But what's going on here? It seems that before we praise Opus 4.8 — which did, after all, pull off the long sentence — we ought to congratulate Anthropic on a third grandfather, “...which his father before him had waited for and his father's father, all of them stationed there...:”

Three shared grandfathers between McCarthy and Faulkner — magnificent. Now it's clear what the point was of inviting two models from the same vendor to the competition. That's a signature you can't forge. On to the final model and the final author.

DeepSeek V4

The station was a weathered shack hunched against the iron and the cinders, and he sat on the bench—the same bench his father had sat on, the wood worn to a smoothness that was the memory of all the bodies that had waited—and heard the rails humming before the whistle, that thin lost cry threading the heat-haze like a voice from a dream he could not recall but had dreamed before, and the train when it came would bring something or take something, he could not remember which, only that the waiting was the thing, the waiting like a held breath in a house where someone had died, and the train would roar through without stopping, leaving him with the sun and the dust and the slow certainty of another afternoon like a road with no turn.

This isn't the first time DeepSeek has shown it knows what it's doing. The bench worn "to a smoothness that was the memory of all the bodies that had waited" is Faulknerian technique in its purest form: the object as a vessel of other people's time, wood that remembers generations. The dream he "could not recall but had dreamed before" uses cyclical time and déjà vu as a form of memory. And "held breath in a house where someone had died" is death transposed into the domestic, everyday register; in the territory of “As I Lay Dying.” Plus, DeepSeek included a brutal ending: the train roars through without stopping; all that waiting was for nothing.

Though it’s good, it’s far from perfect. Three "like X" similes are spaced like metronome clicks at regular intervals, like lampposts along a road; in Faulkner, similes pile up and then vanish for long stretches. The construction "cannot remember" appears twice in a single paragraph (could not recall / could not remember which) — a self-repetition, and a glaring stylistic error. And the long sentence, as with most models, doesn't come off convincingly — everything is long-but-linear, the em-dash inserts are neat, predictable, dull.

That said, we can venture a tentative conclusion: DeepSeek learned from Anthropic, and not only the good things:

Here's what it produced:
«only that the waiting was the thing».

And we had just read, in Opus's Faulkner:
«as though the waiting itself were the thing and not the train».

and in Fable's Faulkner:
«as if he and the waiting were one thing, indivisible».

Is DeepSeek's affliction hereditary?

What the Machines Caught — and What They Didn’t

All five models imitate the scenery, the props, and the signature moves, then display the same authorial tone-deafness. They miss the load-bearing principle of the style, or lose its spirit, ending up closer to parody than reproduction.

1. Not one model reproduced the iceberg's submerged portion — Hemingway's art of deliberate omission. The models are trained to keep talking; they don't know how to stop short on purpose.
2. Not one model, trained to strict compliance, dared to reproduce McCarthy's lawless, defiant punctuation.
3. The most recognizable author got the crudest caricature: for four out of five possible Poes, we got one generic fog.
4. The McCarthy-Faulkner pairing confused the machines too. They reproduced the scenery (deserts, coyotes, the grey pre-dawn hour, against clay, family, the heat of the day) and the sentence length (middling versus one per paragraph). Beyond that, though they bogged down: they produced a shared grandfather figure, the same pose of a motionless protagonist on a platform, and similar Southern diction.
5. Style imitation tipped into outright borrowing more than once. The trout from “Big Two-Hearted River.” The heartbeat from “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Even the best models reach for what they remember about an author rather than writing in the author's manner.
6. One artifact deserves its own label : three models from the same vendor produced the same factory-issue template for two entirely different authors in the "three shared grandfathers."

Someone will say, come on, you're nitpicking, the machines actually did pretty well. We shrug, here are twenty texts, judge for yourselves. We won't answer the questions of "who imitated best" or "by how much Fable outperforms Opus" — to earn that answer, you'd need a larger study: more than one paragraph per author, and multiple runs.

We make no claim to statistical rigor. That said, comparable findings appear in the academic press: a 2025 stylometric study in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities found that GPT-4o captures surface-level stylistic features of canonical authors, but its imitations cluster separately from the originals along deep stylometric signatures.

One more caveat: this test was conducted in the summer of 2026. Investors keep writing checks; the machines keep improving. This magazine (as you've probably noticed) is skeptical of slop, but that is precisely why it warns: to resist the enemy, you have to study it regularly.

We've already written about the problem from the other side of the mirror, where machines mistake real people for machines. Here, machines can't manage to be anything other than themselves.

Don't Try This at Your Desk

We very much hope aspiring writers won't take this test as a how-to guide. Don't even start writing "in the style of X;" everyone but your closest friends and most forgiving relatives will laugh you out of the room. There is one exception: if you're a beginning writer searching for a voice of your own, this kind of exercise can help. But it's better to try different styles yourself and compare the results by eye, not by algorithm alone.

Even in antiquity, grammar and rhetoric schools taught that imitating another's voice is a proven way to discover where your own begins.