Fun with AI, Literary Style

I’m sure that I’m not the only one who finds AI, in its multiple forms, fascinating. I started with ChatGPT and then tried several others: Claude, Gemini, and Copilot. I eventually subscribed to Perplexity AI. I’m on a listserv for board-certified forensic psychologists and Perplexity seemed to be the best for researching topics related to my work. It is also great if you just want to discuss issues and explore random topics such as “Where do chickens come from?” and “Who do historians feel have been the best and worst American presidents?” On the last one, the consensus for greatest president is generally Lincoln, followed by FDR. The worst? I’ll give you a hint: he is only one of two presidents who served non-consecutive terms, and it ain’t Grover Cleveland. 

In professional circles, I get the feeling that people are running scared. My fellow forensic psychologists often post about errors the programs make and how it will be many years before AI does a decent job interpreting psychological tests. That doesn’t stop them from using AI; it just makes them nervous. You do have to check the results of an AI query carefully. Sometimes you’ll be researching some neurological condition and AI will use other blogs as sources rather than hard research from journals, and sometimes it is just plain wrong. But if you do your due diligence and check the citations, it can be amazingly helpful.

Just as an example of this, I was involved in a case in which the plaintiff in a civil action was suing someone for causing them PTSD. Their lawyers flew them out to a midwestern state to have an MRI from a neurologist who had been researching the effects of trauma on the developing brain. This neurologist was no quack; he was doing serious research about the ways trauma can actually affect the structures of the brain. There now is evidence that traumatic experiences can affect the amygdala, which mediates fear response; the hippocampus, which is involved in the creation and storage of memories; and the prefrontal cortex, which does many things, including regulating the experience and expression of emotions. The neurologist in my case had taken things one step further and was using his own techniques to use the results of MRIs to actually diagnose PTSD in individuals. This sounded dubious to me for several reasons. The first of these is that most people who are traumatized don’t develop PTSD, and those that do generally recover within a year. Not everybody recovers; there is a subgroup that appears to develop chronic PTSD. These folks generally had other issues before they were traumatized that made them more vulnerable to the effects of aversive experiences. 

There were other things that made me wonder about the neurologist’s claims. One of these was that journals and news stories are full of research findings that reach statistical significance but have little or no relevance for individuals. This may require a bit of explanation. If I decided to to research the effectiveness of one form of psychotherapy over another, I’d find some kind of outcome measure, maybe scores on the Beck Depression Inventory, to use before and after two groups had 12 sessions of either Therapy A or Therapy B. I might find that those who had Therapy A had a statistically significant reduction in depressive symptoms compared to the Therapy B group. Statistical significance means that the findings of a study are unlikely to have occurred by chance. I won’t go into the math involved, since it is complicated, and truth to tell, I was never very good at that kind of thing; to this day I’m not sure how I passed the statistics courses required in graduate school, but here I am. But statistical significance is generally set at the 0.5 level. This means that the results of a study could only have happened by chance 1 out of 20 times. How did modern science decide this was the sweet spot for research? Beats me. The level is sometimes set at 0.1, which means the results would only happen by chance 1 out of 10 times, which is a lower bar. Or, if you want to be really sure you are on the right track, you could go with 0.01, which works out to a mere 1 out of 100 chances that your findings are just the product of random variation, but at that level you’d never get your academic paper published. 

Think about flipping a coin. If you ask someone how likely it is to flip a coin and have it come up heads, they would reply that it’s a 50/50 proposition. So if you flip the coin 10 times, you should get 5 heads and 5 tails, right? Probably not. We’ve all flipped coins and know that there is some random variation. Sometimes you get 6 heads, sometimes 7. That’s just the way things go. I just asked my AI program how often you’d expect to flip 10 heads in a row, and it works out to about 1 time in every 1000 flips, so if that happens to you, you better check that coin pretty carefully. But it could happen. I recall my father telling me that he was in a poker game with my grandfather and 3 other guys. My father had a straight flush and thought he’d won the pot, but my grandfather had a royal straight flush. Again, AI tells me that the chances of this happening are 1 in 2.77 billion; that’s pretty improbable. Just out of curiosity, I asked Perplexity AI which was more likely—those 2 hands showing up in a poker game or one person being struck by lightning 10 times during their lifetime—and here’s what I got:

To put this in perspective:

• If you played 2.77 billion poker games, you might see the royal/straight flush combo once.
• To see someone struck by lightning 10 times, you’d need more trials than there are atoms in the Milky Way galaxy.

In any case, I tried something new. I asked AI to give me five bullet points about the neurologist’s accomplishments and five criticisms that had been made about his work. AI told me that his work on trauma and brain structures was well known and respected, but his attempts to construct a PTSD brain test were speculative, had not been replicated and, in general, were not ready for prime time. I checked all the references and the AI had described them accurately. This probably saved me several hours of downloading references and getting started with my research.

But as usual, I digress. My point is that once you start playing around with a decent AI program, it can take you down a whole bunch of rabbit holes. And this brings me to the point of this post. One of the things I have tried with AI is having it write poems or songs, which it can do. They aren’t all masterpieces but it’s surprising that it can do it at all. Then I had a thought: could AI take some of my writing and render it in the style of great authors? Gentle reader, here are the results of my literary experiment: 

I picked a couple of paragraphs I had written about my trip to Japan and having breakfast at the hotel buffet:

This is my last morning in Kanazawa. I packed a lot into yesterday and forgot that I was planning to take it easy. I started out with the breakfast buffet at the hotel, which has an interesting mix of Japanese and Western selections. One offering was a make-your-own sushi hand roll. You get a sheet of nori and place some sushi rice on it. Then you pick your toppings. Raw white fish, a little early in the day, but ok. Avocado, mushrooms, cucumber, mayo, wasabi—so far so good. Little shrimp, maybe raw? No, thank you. Then there are little dishes that contain tiny whole squid, about half the size of your little finger, that look like they expired in a pool of soy sauce, not on a bet.

Rolled it up, not bad for a beginner. They also have oden, which is fish cake in several forms, and daikon radish, slow simmered in a light dashi stock. Also wakame salad with glass noodles, pickled lotus root, and potato salad. 

Hemingway

But what if Ernest Hemingway had swaggered through the door of the dining room instead of me? How would he have written about the experience? You need wonder no longer:

This was my last morning in Kanazawa. The sky was gray. I had packed too much into the day before and forgot I meant to rest. I went down to the breakfast room. There was a buffet. They served Japanese food and Western food. I took a plate. There was a sheet of nori and a bowl of rice. I put the rice on the nori. There were toppings. Raw white fish. It was early for raw fish but it was fine. Avocado. Mushrooms. Cucumber. Mayonnaise. Wasabi. I took them. There were little shrimp. They looked raw. I did not take them. There were small squid in a dish. They were the size of a finger. They floated in soy sauce. I left them. I rolled the nori. It was not bad. I was new at it. There was oden too. Fish cake and daikon in broth. There was wakame salad and glass noodles. Pickled lotus root. Potato salad. I ate and drank tea and watched the people come in. It was quiet.

Jerome Jerome

If you have not read “Three Men in a Boat” by Jerome K. Jerome, you should, although what his parents were thinking when they named him I can’t imagine. He was wildly popular from the late 1800s into the 1900s and was known for his gentle style of humor. He would often use an incident as his point of departure for a long digression, using analogies about the anecdote to make a larger point about the culture in which he lived. But honestly, who writes like that? Here’s how Jerome would have written my paragraphs:

My last morning in Kanazawa dawned with that peculiar sense of melancholy which inevitably accompanies the end of any adventure, or indeed, the end of a hotel breakfast buffet. I had, with the best of intentions, resolved to take things easy on my penultimate day, perhaps to recline in a picturesque manner and contemplate the fleeting nature of existence, or at the very least, the fleeting nature of my hotel slippers. Instead, I managed to exhaust myself thoroughly, which, as any experienced traveller will tell you, is the only proper way to see a city—by forgetting entirely that you had meant to do otherwise.

Breakfast at the hotel was a curious affair, a sort of international congress of edibles. The Japanese and Western selections mingled in a manner that would have delighted the organisers of the League of Nations, had they ever thought to include potato salad on the agenda. There was a make-your-own sushi hand roll station, which sounds simple enough until you are confronted with the practicalities of nori, rice, and the existential question of whether raw white fish is truly intended for breakfast, or merely a test of one’s cosmopolitan credentials. I braved it, reasoning that if the locals could face the day thus fortified, so could I—though I drew the line at the little shrimp, which appeared to have been plucked from their beds far too early and looked rather resentful about it.

There were also tiny whole squid, each about half the size of one’s little finger and all of them looking as though they had met their end in a tragic soy sauce incident. I regarded them with the kind of cautious respect one reserves for distant relatives at family reunions—interesting to observe, but best not to engage too closely. My efforts at rolling the sushi were, I flatter myself, not entirely disastrous, though I suspect the staff are still recounting the tale of the foreigner who constructed a sushi roll of such eccentric proportions that it required both hands and a certain amount of moral courage to eat.

Raymond Chandler

But what if a world-weary gumshoe whose bleary eyes had seen too much had tried the breakfast buffet? Let’s have that master of all things noir take a stab at it:

It was my last morning in Kanazawa. The city was waking up slow, like a boxer who’d taken one too many hits the night before. I’d packed yesterday with enough sights and steps to make my feet ache, and somewhere between the temples and the neon I’d forgotten I was supposed to take it easy. That’s how it goes. You plan for leisure, you get exhaustion. The universe has a sense of humor, and it’s usually on you.

Breakfast was a buffet in the hotel, the kind of place where the coffee is strong and the eggs look like they’ve seen things. Japanese and Western, side by side, like two suspects in a lineup who both claim they’ve never met. There was a make-your-own sushi hand roll station. You take a sheet of nori, slap some rice on it, and try not to look like you’re new at the game. The toppings were laid out in little bowls, neat as evidence bags. Raw white fish—early for that kind of risk, but I’d seen worse. Avocado, mushrooms, cucumber, mayo, wasabi. All the usual suspects.

Then there were shrimp, maybe raw, maybe just cold enough to fool you. I passed. I don’t trust anything that small with that many legs before noon. There were tiny squid, half the size of your little finger, floating in soy sauce like they’d drowned in their own secrets. I left them alone. I’ve got enough ghosts.

I rolled up the sushi. Not bad for a beginner. Not good, either, but nobody was watching. There was oden—fish cake in more disguises than a two-bit grifter, and daikon radish, slow-simmered in a broth as light as a promise at closing time. Wakame salad with glass noodles, pickled lotus root, potato salad. The kind of spread that makes you wonder if the chef’s working through something.

I ate, watched the rain on the window, and thought about the day ahead. Kanazawa was already slipping away, like smoke from a cheap cigarette. That’s travel for you. You’re always leaving, even when you’re still there.

Shakespeare

I was on a roll, so I asked the Bard of Avon to do his thing. I was particularly impressed that AI included the stage directions:

TRAVELLER:
O, Kanazawa! Thou art a city rich in wonders and in breakfast buffets. Methought to idle, yet found myself ensnared in enterprise, as oft lovers are in Arden’s wood. Would that I had heeded mine own counsel to take mine ease, yet adventure, like a mischievous sprite, did lead me on.

Enter the HOTEL BUFFET, a merry assembly of dishes, attended by SERVING MAIDENS.

TRAVELLER (aside):
Behold, a banquet fit for Puck himself! Here mingleth the fare of East and West, as if Titania herself had bid her fairy cooks to conjure such delights. A make-your-own sushi hand roll? Faith, this is sport for a morning’s fancy!
(Takes nori and rice)
Now, what brave toppings shall attend my roll? Raw white fish, so pale and trembling, as if it would rather be in bed. Avocado, mushrooms, cucumber, mayo, and wasabi—these are companions most agreeable.

Enter SHRIMP and SQUID, disguised as breakfast.

TRAVELLER:
But soft! What crustaceous knaves are these? Shrimp, perhaps raw, and squid, so small and woebegone, as if they expired in a briny pool. I prithee, pass me by; I am not so bold as to make thee my morning’s conquest.

He rolls the sushi, with comic ineptitude.

TRAVELLER:
Thus rolled, ‘tis not a work for the ages, yet it shall suffice. Oden, thou art a stew of many faces—fish cake, daikon, all a-swim in dashi’s gentle tide. Wakame salad, glass noodles, pickled lotus root, and potato salad—what motley crew is this, to share one board?

Enter CLOWNISH WAITER, with a flourish.

WAITER:
Good sir, wilt thou have more tea, or perhaps a tale of mistaken identity to season thy meal?

TRAVELLER:
Nay, friend, I have had my fill of both. For in this city, as in all the world, the feast is ever mixed—strange and familiar, comic and earnest, and always ending, as all good comedies do, with a full belly and a gentle parting.

Exeunt omnes, the TRAVELLER pausing at the threshold, half in hope and half in farewell.

Chaucer

I was traveling on a sort of pilgrimage, and so were the characters in the Canterbury Tales, so having Chaucer do a rewrite seemed appropriate:

Here bigynneth the Tale of the Pilgrym in Kanazawa

Whan that the sonne up on Kanazawa shoon,
And I, a pilgrym, wist mine tyme was doon,
I roused me fro my bed with hevy cheere,
Remembryng wel my vow to reste me heere.
But yesternight, with curious hert and eye,
I wandered long, and let my purpose flye.

Forth to the hostelry I made my way,
Where buffet riche was set for brek of day.
There found I metes of divers naciouns,
A merry throng of sundry temptaciouns.
The Japanees and Western fare did meete,
As if in fellowship, both salt and sweete.

A sheet of nori, black as any coale,
With rice as white as snowe upon a pole,
Lay there for me to fashion my own rolle.
And toppings stood in row, both fresh and rare—
Raw fish of white, that made me stonde and stare,
And avocado, mushrooms, cucumber greene,
With mayonais and wasabi betwene.

Some shrimp there was, perchance not cooked nor warme,
And little squid, so small, they did no harme—
But in a dish of soy they did abyd,
As if they’d drowned, their dignity aside.
“By corpus bones!” quod I, “these pass me by;
I’ll leave such fare to knyghtes of more hardye.”

Yet rolled I up my sushi, not unmeet,
Though clumsy was my hand, and not so neet.
Oden was there, with fish-cake, daikon roote,
A broth so light, it made my spirits hoote.
Wakame salad, glassy noodles shene,
Pickled lotus root, and potato beene.

Thus did I brek my fast, with joy and wonder,
And watched the folk about me, up and under.
So Kanazawa, faire and passing sweete,
I take my leve, til next we chance to meete.

Heere endeth the Pilgrym’s Brekfast in Kanazawa.

Icelandic Saga

When I was a kid, I loved Marvel comics and read them obsessively. This became a concern for my parents and my father briefly forbade them, with the exception of Classics Illustrated. They rendered books including Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and the Iliad, into comic book form.

My father eventually relented and I went back to reading my favorite titles. These included The Hulk, Fantastic Four, and Avengers. But Thor was my favorite and sparked a lifetime interest in world mythology. I read the comics but wanted more, so I began reading books on the subject of Norse mythology; this led me to read a number of the old Icelandic sagas, including Njal’s saga, The Elder Edda, and Hrolf Kraki’s saga. These writers had a particular style; they were not big on internal dialogue and focused more on what people did or said, embellished with some literary circumlocutions. For example, blood became “wound dew,” the sea was the “whale-road,” and the sun became a “sky candle.” Here’s how an old viking bard (skald) might have described my breakfast:

The Song of the Traveler’s Dawn in Kanazawa

Hear now the tale of the far-wanderer,
West-lands’ child in the city of gold-leaf,
Last morn’s light on the roofs of Kanazawa,
Memory’s burden heavy as stone.

Yesterday’s journey, swift-footed and eager,
Left the mind weary, the body unstill.
Yet the sun summoned, bright wheel of heaven,
To the hall of feasting, the hearth of the hostel.

There the morning-table, bounty-laden,
Offered the gifts of two great peoples:
Sea’s children and earth’s harvest, side by side.
Sheets of sea-shield, nori’s black armor,
Rice-mountain’s offspring, white as the snowfields,
Awaited the hand of the roll-maker.

Brave was the traveler, bold in the dawn, Chose the flesh of wave-wanderers, raw and gleaming,
White-finned fish, cold from the ocean’s cradle.
Green-avocado, earth’s soft treasure,
Mushroom and cucumber, garden’s bright bounty,
Fire-rooted wasabi, and the pale cloud of mayo.

But the small shrimp, sea’s pale daughters,
Uncooked, untested, the wanderer spurned.
And the squid, finger-sized, soy-soaked and silent,
Lay in their grave-pool, unchosen, untouched.

The hand rolled the feast, clumsy yet eager,
Beginner’s courage in the face of the unknown.
Oden’s cauldron, broth of the sea-gods,
Fish-cake and daikon, slow-simmered and subtle,
Wakame’s green tangle, glass-noodles shining,
Lotus-root, pickled, and potato’s pale mound.

Thus broke the fast, in the land of the rising sun,
Strength gathered for the road’s last stretch.
Silent sat the traveler, watching the folk,
Dreaming of journeys, and the day’s gentle ending.

So ends this morning-song, Kanazawa’s farewell,
May the gods of travel guard the wanderer’s path.

Haruki Murakami

My first exposure to Murakami was Kafka on the Shore, written in 2002. The story follows a 15-year-old runaway who’s afraid that he will fulfill a curse that states that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister. It also features an elderly man who appears to be simpleminded but can communicate with cats. I followed the book up with 1Q84, a lengthy novel about a young woman with a sideline as an assassin who kills men who abuse women. She gets stuck in traffic while riding in a cab and opts to take a ladder down to street level where she finds herself in a different reality not unlike our own but very different in subtle ways. Murakami moves effortlessly between clear descriptions of mundane reality and otherworldly scenes of dreams and mysticism. Since my experience with the breakfast buffet occurred in Japan, it seemed only right to have AI rewrite my paragraph in his style.

My last morning in Kanazawa. The rain had stopped sometime before dawn, leaving the city washed and faintly luminous, as if someone had quietly replaced the usual sunlight with a softer, more considerate version. I sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the distant hum of the tram. It sounded like a memory from another life, or maybe just a song I’d forgotten the words to.

Yesterday, I’d promised myself to take it easy, but somehow I’d ended up walking for hours, letting the city pull me along. Kanazawa has a way of doing that. You think you’re in control, but really you’re just following a thread someone else left behind.

The breakfast buffet at the hotel was quiet. A few other guests moved through the room, silent as ghosts. I poured myself coffee, black and a little bitter, and surveyed the spread: Japanese and Western, side by side, like two parallel worlds that sometimes overlapped. There was a make-your-own sushi hand roll station. I took a sheet of nori and pressed rice onto it, the grains sticking to my fingers. I chose toppings—raw white fish (strange for breakfast, but not unpleasant), avocado, mushrooms, cucumber, a dab of mayo, a line of wasabi. The shrimp looked uncertain, as if they weren’t sure they belonged here. I left them for someone braver, or less awake.

There were small dishes of whole squid, curled and silent in soy sauce. They reminded me of something I couldn’t quite place—a dream, maybe, or an old photograph. I passed them by. I rolled the sushi, clumsily, and ate it. It tasted fine, but also a little like something unfinished.

There was oden, too: fish cake and daikon, simmered in a light broth. Wakame salad with glass noodles, pickled lotus root, potato salad. I tried a bit of everything, not out of hunger but curiosity. The food was good, but it didn’t fill the quiet space inside me.

Afterwards, I sat by the window and watched the city. People came and went, umbrellas tucked under their arms. The world outside felt distant, like the surface of a deep, slow-moving river. I wondered if I’d remember this morning, or if it would fade into the background noise of all the other mornings. Maybe it didn’t matter. Some things stay with you, even if you can’t explain why.

All of this got me thinking about the abilities of the AI program, so I tried one further experiment. I wrote a paragraph about an incident that occurred at an anti-Trump rally, added my original paragraphs about breakfast in Kanazawa, and asked the program to render it in the same style. Here’s what I got back:

I went to an anti-Trump demonstration this afternoon, expecting the usual mix of clever signs, impromptu speeches, and that particular energy you get when a crowd is united by a common cause. I was just walking up, weaving through the clusters of people holding banners and chanting, when a young man—maybe eighteen, skinny, with a buzz cut—turned around too fast and bumped into me. Before I could even register what happened, he squared up like a boxer, fists up, daring me to hit him. The whole thing escalated in about three seconds. I lost my temper and told him that if he swung at me, I’d twist his head off his neck. Not my finest moment, but there it was.

People jumped between us, voices rising, hands out, everyone suddenly invested in keeping the peace. We were separated, and I had a moment to breathe and realize how ridiculous the whole thing was. I found the kid again, calmed down, and explained that it was all a misunderstanding—just an accident, no harm meant. He took it well, actually. We shook hands, a little awkwardly, but there was real relief on both sides. The tension drained away, replaced by that sheepish feeling you get when you realize you’ve both overreacted in public.

Of course, the police showed up right on cue, blue uniforms cutting through the crowd, and started questioning him. I stepped in and told them there was no harm done, just a misunderstanding that had already been sorted out. They seemed satisfied, and I left soon after, still buzzing with leftover adrenaline. Walking home, I thought about how quickly things can turn, even among people who are supposed to be on the same side. Sometimes, all it takes is a bump in a crowd to remind you that everyone’s carrying their own nerves, and that a little patience—maybe a handshake—can go a long way.

Not exactly my style, but as they say, close enough for government work. I wonder how long it will be before it is possible to have an idea for a story, write an outline, and then tell the AI program that you want 200 pages in the style of Dashiell Hammett? Stay tuned.