AI really doesn’t get Kingsley Amis. I asked for an Amis imitation and the results were contrary to his spirit. The imitation of Somerset Maugham didn’t score either, but at least Maugham might possibly have written it. AI’s Tom Stoppard showed some promise; the Pinter seemed color-by-numbers.
With Amis the big screw-up was that ChatGPT saw him as a kindly sort of man, a man ready to appreciate others and ignore their affectations, nervous mannerisms, and oddities of dress or hairstyle. I asked for a description of Paul Shaffer and David Letterman bantering on air. AI described two blanks who got along and one of the blanks had a keyboard. The writing sounded like no one at all. Amis has some traits: the ones I can think of are ironic circumlocution that wraps about an ill-natured meaning, and diction that deliberately breaks down when a strong point must be made (vernacular phrasing bursts out, short sentences pelt after each other). ChatGPT hasn’t noticed as much, and it’s ass-backward regarding the Paul and Dave relationship. Dave picked on Paul, but the AI has Paul ribbing Dave: “the exchange settled into a rhythm as dependable as any tune Shaffer might play: tease, protest, escalation, and the shared laughter that followed, warm with the understanding that the quarrel was a performance and the friendship beneath it perfectly sound.” Good God, no.
The Maugham bits were the first and last paragraphs of a hypothetical short story about Jay Leno’s battle with Conan O’Brien. The two paragraphs were heavy on the ironic outlook, and like Maugham they didn’t mind saying outright what the reader should pay attention to. Other than that, no, not much Maugham. None of the handy cliches that held his prose together (“hand over fist,” “beside herself,” “raining cats and dogs”), no travel detail (he would’ve made something of Los Angeles and Hollywood), and no sense that somehow the narrator’s talking to you. The opening features an un-Maughamish rush of contractions: “The quarrel between the two comedians was, to the casual observer, a trifling affair of contracts and clock hands…” The c-words may be a tribute to hack joke writing, but “contracts and clock hands” isn’t Maugham. Sprightly phrasemaking wasn’t his thing; he took phrases readymade and assembled them.
I asked for Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter arguing about cricket. AI made the dialogue a comedy sketch, with Stoppard effusive and Pinter taciturn; flossy sentences cavorted around brief responses. The taciturnity and several appearances by “Pause” covered the Pinter angle. Stoppard’s material worked better; I suppose that of the two he has more to imitate if plot isn’t included. In the sketch, the two men disagree about a match. Pinter says everyone heard ball touch bat. Stoppard answers: “Everyone believes they heard it. Collective certainty is a marvelous invention— it saves a great deal of thinking.” Pinter replies, “You’re saying they’re imagining it.” Stoppard: “I’m saying imagination is the silent partner in every sporting event. Without it, we’d merely have men in white clothing interrupting a lawn.” And so on until the finish (“A beat. Pinter almost smiles”).
These bits strike me as being like Stoppard but not up to his standard. The phrasing of the aphorism sounds bald, as if the speaker knew he were nailing down a truth and plumed himself on it. And sporting events don’t rely on imagination, so a different abstraction has to anchor “interrupting a lawn.” Rules might do it or tradition, or something less expected but still germane. On the other hand, the line itself works and I think interrupt’s an acute verb. Subtract some essential quality and a cricket match is just a collection of men who get in the way; you can’t see the lawn.
I asked ChatGPT for a closing paragraph. It sent something much too long and unwieldy, none of it sounded like me, and the points mentioned all seemed like second cousins to the points that were made above. “These writers are not sets of features to be recombined but temperaments at work,” the paragraph says, as if the technical imitation—the recombining of features—had gone off all right and the problem was lack of feel for the writers’ personalities. But the imitations weren’t that good. On temperaments AI was worse, but on features it was so-so. I asked for a rewrite of that sentence by Andre Gide and received this: “Quant aux tempéraments, l’IA se révélait plus défaillante encore; pour les traits, elle ne s’en tirait que passablement.” Take it for what it’s worth.