Kindred Sprit: A Literary Style Mixer

Kindred Spirits and Such Like Things

I occasionally like to write to gather my thoughts... and to avoid my inbox. When I do — write — and get to the end of a thing or a stopping point, and put down my phone, or my pen, or my PC, I find that I want feedback. A little feedback. Not a lot. And a certain kind of feedback. I only want to know if I have hit the mark. The one I have in mind, though. Not THE MARK… I am not interested in clear communication, or conciseness, or consistency. I do not want to hear from people who are too strong in their opinions or too rational—God forbid. I am interested in knowing if a thought, a sentence, a paragraph, a word I have put down — has the right sound… not if it sounds right.

I know writers. I work with writers. I have writers in my family… and academics on my block. I am surrounded by experts. But they have too much… expertise. And I am in the market for someone who thinks the way I think — who is not overly particular about structure or clarity but is smarter than I am and more clear-headed. And less cobwebby. They will have to be crafty with conjunctions and agile with adjectives... I will want for them to be far more well-read, and to have seen more, and to know more than I do — if any of this is to make sense. Also, they will have to have an admirably high tolerance for drivel and a low tolerance for polish. They will need to be able to stomach unlikely premises and run-on sentences and plenty of tongue-talking and incantations… BUT they have to have gravitas, too; otherwise, why would I trust them when they warn me that I am losing the reader or call me out for being too cute or too derivative or too complain-y. This critic will have to have a preternatural sense of what I am after without requiring an explanation or needing to be persuaded... Really, my mother fits the bill. She could do this. She is a writer. And a real one at that. And she, more than anybody, would know what I am after. But the memo I have here states that once a person has reached a certain age, their mother is to be shown only a thing in its final state. Otherwise, she is liable to succumb to the instinct to encourage even a grim and hopeless pursuit and this would lead to the breaking of spells. And no good could ever come of that. So, mothers are out of the question.

Editors too. Off the list.

Their lives have been so full of failure and rejection that they cannot help but take it out on the rest of us. They may think of themselves as great bastions of piety because so many of their kind are too virtuous to hunt or fish. Some will not squash mosquitoes. So convinced are they of their righteousness that they somehow fail to acknowledge -even to themselves- the brutality of their vocation. How blithely and summarily they will take down the work of a week, a month, or even a year. They may lack the pluck in real life to look a neighbor in the eye, but when armed with a QWERTY and a cursor, they will routinely commit murder, positively massacre morale, wipe people out, and show no remorse. I think they even do it for sport. These people are not to be trifled with. They will hang you for misplacing a gerund and do terrible, terrible things to those who leave their participles dangling, even just a little.

I need someone a good deal more sparing… someone who is not allergic to technical ineptitude or delusions of functional humor. I need someone who will gently comb through the ramblings and prune and clip a little here and there… this overlong sentence, that crooked comparison, one or two withering clichés, a stunted motif, a malnourished allegory that never made it off the ground… the odd flabby metaphor … but with barber's shears; not with chainsaws.

A real editor would raze my pages to the roots. I will not have that. But for a week or two, this absence of an authority, a specialist, a counterpart — of the right type— was haunting me. I started flipping through my mental Rolodex. Skimming through contacts. I know no one selfless or unoccupied enough to be willing to monitor my sentence structure, indulge me with insights on style, wrestle deep into the night over word counts and hyphens. No one that is whose thought patterns skew as meandering, shambolic, and ill-punctuated as mine.

Over the past weekend, this desperation for a custom editor led me down an unexpected path that ended with a genie — of a kind… And a good deal more brackets and reasons and stop_reasons than I ever could have imagined... these are coding terms. And had you told me three days ago that those words, along with nulls and console_errors, would —in short order— be floating in front of my eyes every time I blink, and that words like Baz and Foo would have any meaning whatsoever, I would not have believed you. You also could not have convinced me that within mere days I would need to be reminded that for most of the civilized world, WTF does indeed mean "what the fuck" and not "whitespace formatting tool,"

But here I am, three-ish days later, ready to confess how it came to pass that I now know that within the realm of something called JavaScript—which has little to do with coffee but requires a person, or at least this person, to have much coffee to make sense of it—and which, causes jitters regardless —when it comes to pass that an asynchronous operation encounters a premature termination, the cause is dutifully recorded in its stop_reasons array. And that each entry, with its succinct string, captures the specific grievance that brought operations to a screeching halt.

When debugging, one may witness or even initiate a breakpoint. This is when the program is behaving like a small and petulant bird. And it amounts to a temporary halt. Sometimes, the software turns up several plaintive poetic bursts such as step-over or step-out, and these are like timid rodents or prairie dogs that poke their heads up out of the ground every so often. Always on alert for unseen dangers... but this family of alarm can also be quite nasty— And much depends on how and when one encounters such a creature. If one has just recovered from a close call - a blank screen - or one of those meaningless sequences of numbers and percentages… That kind of run-in... there is not much consolation to be had. And in those moments, even when faced with relatively meek-seeming litanies of: exception and restart-frame, one is apt to interpret them as very ill-intentioned - like the rabid mismatched cousins of those inoffensive step-overs and step-outs.

Reactions to all manner of machinic ridicule and the general prognosis for a given pathology greatly depend upon a person's degree of wakefulness… If one is beginning to falter, then Syntax_Errors, and Type_Errors, and Cannot read properties of null (reading 'property') warnings can be very bad signs, no doubt. But if the Java has kicked in and one can keep their commas under control, then these variables can be exterminated. Indeed, these execution errors are the very mosquitoes and gnats of scripting, and they, like their real-world counterparts, do occasionally get the better of us. They are insufferable and nagging, and sometimes there is just about no amount of ampersands or awaits or try...catch-es one can throw at them to get them to skitter back from whence they came…

Full disclosure: there are some bleatings of the code that are so frightening, opaque, and inscrutable that I am still at a total loss to comprehend what they stand for, and the mere mention of a thing like a source-mask-unbinding can have me ducking for cover and heading for the hills and pressing undo until I have reversed time nearly to the dawn of the project… and there are the menacing, cryptic, and unsettling whispers of undefined that are just plain haunting — like so many unknowable, mythical, fugitive creatures — uncertain, elusive, ashamed.

Taken in isolation, the code snippets are like Dada non-sequiturs. But within the context of their designated function, they represent the harshly comprehensible semaphores of a language designed to digitally fashion reality itself. They speak to the script's manic need to meticulously catalog every hiccup, every infinitesimal stumble of its cybernetic juggling.

So, back to where I started. As I spun in my seat, thinking about this hypothetical editor-guru, I considered the traits they would need. They should have sympathy for complex narratives, provocative self-insertion, and the psychological depth of Norman Mailer, combined with the gonzo journalism and hyperbole of Hunter S. Thompson. They should absorb Toni Morrison’s fluency with symbolism and possess a stomach for satire, dark humor, and things that are occasionally a little mean. And in case it ever becomes necessary, they should be able to tolerate a pinch of science fiction—so being a Vonnegut completist would certainly help.

They would need to appreciate fantastical characters, clever turns of phrase, and subtle observations bundled with self-effacing whimsy. In other words, they cannot have slept on Simon Rich. Genre-bending and extended philosophical reflection? That brings Zadie Smith to mind. And let us not forget Roald Dahl for his understated absurdity and eccentricity. By now, I sense you getting nervous, but I have not forgotten that they must also appreciate Gabriel García Márquez’s lush language and distrust of strict linearity.

I thought I might be done, but they probably should have read Robertson Davies for his sharp humor, erudition, and touches of magic realism. And because every group benefits from at least one or two Canadians. Murakami, check. Hurston, check. Hardy, sure. I know—it is starting to sound like a syllabus. But their attentions would have to be particular. Take H.G. Wells, for instance. They would need to know the precise sliver of Wells I am partial to—not the alien invasions or time travelers, but the pacing, the blend of science and storytelling, and perhaps his slightly overwrought prose.

Then there is Rushdie—his polyphonic narratives, his sharp compound adjectives, and his oblique addressing of identity, legacy, and power. If this editor-entity is to navigate the tangled web of terms, they should also have some knowledge of David Foster Wallace’s irredeemably maximalist efforts and the way Okorafor’s speculations start out familiar but soon veer mythologically off course.

Well, if Mailer, Thompson, and Wallace are in, then Philip Roth certainly makes the cut. We are not conjuring a saint—we are fantasizing about wordsmiths and tall-tale tellers. So Roth’s fluency with counterfactuals and springy social commentary is necessary, though perhaps not the prurient details.

By now, I feel as though I am building a totem, each head leading to another, nearly reaching the clouds. Soon you will have to imagine the rest. But I should point out that they must also grasp how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s descriptions of imagery become so well lodged in place that, even if you lose a book between the mattress and headboard for six months, you can pick it up and recall every face and figure with perfect clarity.

This chimera is starting to come into focus. But I nearly left out Nabokov — Not a chance though. but I do not even mean the writing per se—that too, of course… the demand here, though, is that they have an ear for his cadence. It should not come as a surprise to them that on account of Nabokov’s formidable ear for language and percussive sentences structure, I once listened to the entirety of Zashchita Luzhina (The Luzhin Defense) in Russian in a single day in 1X speed without understanding a single word and still credit it as one of the very best audiobooks I have heard.

I have lost a few of you, I know. And this Rushmore is still missing names and overheavy in this or that area... but, at this point I think we should just add a few flourishes. A highlight here and there. So, Shel Silverstein for his playful, rhythmic, and evocative phrasing and to counteract some the headier selections. I seem to still have the reigns here so I will add Tom Waits to the mix, too, for grit and atmosphere, and surrealism, and tenderness. But before we push this phantasm too far off the deep end, we need to be sure that they are equipped with a floating device or two. We have already secured Ronson, but it may take more than that to make sure that things are not always flying off the rails. So, we should persuade the amalgamation to also be receptive to someone a great deal more likable and accessible than the majority of the motley collection to this point. Bill Bryson will do the trick; I think it may be hard to find anyone as cheerful and contagiously enthusiastic as he is. I hope they would be able to see that it is his signature touch of self-deprecating humor and his ability to marvel at just about any discovery no matter the scale that allows him to get away with sneaking in just so many detailed observations that we barely even register that we are not merely being entertained.

So here, while I was mentally cobbling together this ultimate understander, it dawned on me that I was describing the literary lovechild I aspire to be… And I remembered receiving a small claret-colored Swiss army knife as a child. I recall how impressed I was by its novelty and a little shocked to find how ingeniously it was designed and how obviously useful it would be to have so many tools, twenty-something — I think, nestled neatly and tightly enough to fit them all in one’s pocket at once, even if it was a bit of a bulky thing and made my jorts sag to my knees. I used it often, though, and struggled to imagine why my parents did not each have one of their own or how it made any sense at all that the whole adult world seemed either to be entirely unaware of this invention or, for some unfathomable reason, to be constitutionally resistant to conveniences of any kind or to any and all good ideas. I found a use for every single tool and when I did not have a real reason, I manufactured one. I was landlocked and still found a purpose for the fish scaler (an impromptu back scratcher). I even used the tweezers and the toothpick! Though I mostly used the tweezers to pull out the toothpick. A few years later, I modified a rain jacket with 34 pockets and everything an eleven-year-old adventurer might need to go questing where they may… From the outside, it looked mostly normal, but the pockets were filled to the brim and when the wearer would unzip the jacket and peel it open to reveal the lining, one would discover snack compartments and a place for tools, including wire cutters and fire starter; there was a Telescoping Fishing Rod Hood, Bubble Wrap Elbow Pads, a Glow-in-the-Dark Zipper, Treat Dispensing Sleeves (in case of a coyote or a wolf encounter), Self-Inflating Life Preserver Collar, a Compass Patch, a Camouflage bug net, bug repellent, sun tan lotion (it was the 80s), a Walkie-Talkie, a First Aid Kit, an emergency Whistle, a Magnifying Glass, and a Mini Flashlight. I called this Swiss Army knife of a garment the Kangaroo Jacket. I won a school award for it, but I am sure it was my mother who did the sewing.

I am not sure what became of that kangaroo jacket. Or the pocketknife. I imagine my childhood self would be very disappointed to learn that I had lost it and in so doing, joined the ranks of the willfully indifferent. But maybe I was not to be written off just yet. Was I not right then doing all I could to think of a way to conjure up some kangaroo Calliope… Maybe my long-forgotten aptitude for practicality and efficiency was trying to resurface. Here I was again wanting to have very many things in one place, in my pocket — or close at hand. I would tell the child not to despair. I was on the march.

But I had questions. In a pocketknife, there are some tools that one needs frequently. Practically all the time - the knife, for instance - for cutting things and whittling and cutting more things and for holding it in one's hands when one is in need of some courage because there is a rustling in the bush and it is dark and one is alone, even if it is only their own backyard. But then there are also the corkscrew and the parcel hook. And at age 6, I was more for the chocolate milk than the chardonnay, and I did not receive many letters; the ones I did receive, it seemed to me could be dispatched easily enough with one's hands. For such a thing as an implement to have come into existence, the culture must have been very much different than our own. I have a hard time imagining what degree of civility and cultivation it would take, what kind of meek, unspoiled state of mind one would need to occupy to require such a tool so as to avoid causing an envelope to suffer the unthinkable indignity of being inexpertly shredded by a pair of bare hands. For the record, in the year nineteen hundred and eighty-something, this venerable Victorian protector of envelope pride did duty as a makeshift marshmallow roasting stick when flames were small, and sticks were in short supply.

This pocket-knife line of thinking made me realize that the entity I was on about would not be useful if everyone had an equal presence in the mix. After all, some of the authors I mentioned I like only for their subject matter and others mostly for their words. Some are knives, sure, but there are letter openers in that bunch and at least one fish scaler. So, there would need to be fractions in the formulae, things in varying degrees, like three scoops of Borges, two of Edson, and five-ish of Chabon, and no small amount of Rich. But it would not be good either for such a state of DNA to calcify… And sometimes things change, tastes evolve, and one day, one may really find themselves in near desperate need of - even a corkscrew. So, it would need to be reconfigurable, updatable, eminently editable — such that Roald Dahl could sometimes be dialed down to 0 but sometimes be let to verily take the party over.

Then I wondered if there might be a way to create such an amalgamation to discuss and edit my work, to workshop ideas, study style, create a dialogue, and tease out patterns. This would provide more control than the vague notions I have in my head about the kind of "love child" of various voices I might aspire to become or simply aspire to engage with.

I confessed that I wanted to bring this fantasy being into existence - this veritable Voltron of Letters, to Claude AI. Like all LLMs Claude is a good deal more than just a language model. And that description is either vestigial from the period that predates even the computer scientists’ ability to imagine the degree to which the volume of data to which a model is exposed might lead to emergent capabilities and knowledge across domains. It is possible too though that this humble description is intended as a smokescreen or a means of allaying fears or postponing the panic that would likely ensue if the waking world were even a little bit aware of just how deep their faculties run. By this point, Claude had already been an expert at translation and computer vision and image interpretation and diagram designing and chart-reading and programming for a year or more but our ability to take advantage of its powers was somewhat limited by the modesty of its interface. Its presentation is a mere chatbot. But my pursuit of this literary totem pole, this fusion of muses…(musion?), coincided with the release of two new features in Claude AI - Projects and Artifacts. The project feature is a shared workspace with a knowledge base, custom instructions, and collaborative chats - it is a great improvement in terms of keeping things organized and staying in a conversation on a single topic or effort over a period of time. The Artifact feature allows the model to generate and share substantial pieces of content, including extensive blocks of code, formatted text, and visual diagrams in a dedicated window alongside the main conversation. This makes it easier to review, edit, and build upon the output of the AI. I had not yet tried the new features, but I cautiously waded deeper into conversation with Claude about what I had in mind and the kinds of features I would require. I engaged the model in hypotheticals. We discussed what is known about latent space representation, we discussed native style embeddings, underlying tensor operations, and automatic differentiations. I asked about the potential implications of disentangled representations, and I wanted to know technical details related to ethical considerations, and just what the inference process might look like if one were to summon such a thing. There were sparks of ideas and vague notions floating all over. I was feeling ready. Almost ready. So, I opened a Project. I gave it a name… And I saw that it was good.

I admitted that I am no coder from the outset. I needed for Claude to know the truth. But I do have some familiarity with how these models work and tried to impress it with a lot of talk about how native style embeddings and parallel processing could preempt the need for actual fine-tuning or retraining of a model for a useful instantiation of the imagined amalgamated literary figure. Claude is trained not to mock. He did not mock. He was encouraging- a little cartoonishly so. And since he is a machine and has no nerves for one to get on, he permitted me to go on and on with high-level descriptions of the tool and continued to humor me with polite, affirming replies. Here is a screenshot… LM’s are excellent at ignoring typos. In these exchanges, I privilege speed overall, so if you are typo-intolerant, avert your eyes and feel free to skip ahead…

This went on for pages… and then I hit Claude with, "Let's just do it. Now," and the AI seemed actually to be taken aback, surprised, as if it thought I might be bluffing. I believe the actual reply began with, "I appreciate your enthusiasm!" Which is an LM euphemism for “Bullshit, buddy”! But I described how the interface might operate and the specific nature of the prompts and various approaches we might try to optimize inference and discourage the model from overfitting or approximating too closely the style and voice of an author. I waited for Claude’s reply. His cursor blinked enigmatically. He seemed unconvinced. I reassured him that I had an API key. And some ideas about the Hex colors… Either to shut me up or to prove that he had heard me or because something I had said had finally convinced him or because my network finally reconnected, an instant later, The artifact window sprang to life, and Claude was doing something, drawing up some React code in the artifact window, and then BANG! The digits disappeared and were replaced with sliders that could actually be slid around and placeholders for where the author's names would be. Of course, the sliders were not controlling anything yet, but they looked just the way I described them, and they functioned. And this gave me the confidence that we could work together and that with Claude at my side, Claude as the dive master, so long as I could hold my breath and submerge myself in VSC and a handful of PowerShell for long enough to get oriented, we might see this project through to the end.

In fact, we had a working prototype within about three hours though it took three days and nights altogether to reach its current state…; parts of the journey were greatly harrowing due to failed code, poor syntax, my complete lack of familiarity, running out of tokens every hour or two, deprecated this and deprecated that, and a whole lot of heartache trying to get it to work with Vercel—a cloud platform that helps developers build, scale, and secure web applications. We never got it to work with Vercel, but in the end, we got a working prototype.

Now that I am on the other side, though, and have come up for air, I can see the distance we have traveled and how vast the abyss we dodged to get from that shore to this. And I can confirm that if not for Claude, I would have undoubtedly drowned along the way or returned to shore in failure, leaving behind a maelstrom teeming with countless corpses of corrupted code. I can also confidently declare that the process of collaborating with Claude, in the way I have, has been virtually seamless. And that this way of working anticipates the likely direction AI will head, and how it may evolve and become assimilated into our lives. It seems all but inevitable that the lines between human and machine capabilities will entirely blur. Wittingly or not, we are paving paths toward a future in which AI-powered tools will be indispensable companions and partners in a wide range of intellectual and creative pursuits.

Whether or not you agree that this application is ethically alright or useful at all or that there are legitimate opportunities for learning and internalizing through engaging with a customizable synthetic mashup of one’s literary heroes, the real story here is that an individual with no training and no knowledge of code whatsoever could go from zero—a flicker of an idea—to a functional application in mere days. And that it is only on account of these latest developments in AI, a noteworthy upgrade to an interface, a bit of disregard for personal maintenance, some good old blind recklessness, and caffeine-induced audacity that such a thing could ever come about.

Postscript (Two Days Later)

Now I’ve done it.

They’re after me…The writer gods are.

I may need a place to hide.

See, they found out what I’ve been doing, and they don’t like it. And now they want my head. They don’t even care about my hard drive. They want my actual head! Maybe worse… Who? The gods! That’s who. The literary gods want my head.

I tried talking to ChatGPT about it; I may have even asked her to intervene, but even she was equivocating. And she is literally programmed to be reassuring.

So, now I may need your help. And I’m not sure how much time I’ve got. Hence, the contractions.

If anybody comes asking, tell them you have not seen me. Make up some gobbledygook socials. Convince them that I’m a bot, that they have the wrong name, that I do not exist, and that it wasn’t me. If they direct you to my GitHub project, just deflect and deny—deny, deny, deny. Tell them they are hallucinating. If they threaten you, try saying my computer went rogue, but I had nothing to do with any of this.

Here’s what happened. This is how I know that I’m in trouble. Just after I finished writing the piece above, I decided to plug the last paragraph into the Literary Style Mixer application that Claude and I developed. I wanted to see how the combo of Titans would have finished up the piece. I wondered how my ending would stack up. I suspected that my closing lacked oomph. Still, I was willing to go with it… but figured that if, by chance, the app were to yield a better ending, I would update the final sentence and add the AI attribution. After all, considering the content, it might make a whole lot of sense to give the last word to the AI. But, in all honesty — and I realize this will sound conceited — I couldn’t imagine a different closing than the one I’d ended up with - anything else would surely throw off the rhythm irreparably. So, I figured that no matter which sliders were at what level, they couldn’t but agree that despite the somewhat anemic attempt at theatricality, the ending could only be one of two choices: "that such a thing could ever come about"… or maybe… maybe — "that such a thing could even come about ". And though I recognize that both of these options somehow manage to sound grandiose while simultaneously lacking verve, I couldn't dream of an alternative. Some sentences are plain pillories, and there is really not much room to maneuver this way or that. So… you can imagine my shock and humiliation when the application did return with an alternative ending such as the one I’m about to share… It began with “that such a thing could…” And then went on in just the following way, word for word.

“Have led to this singularly unimpressive yet existentially troubling creation.

In a world grown too technologically obtuse, here was living proof that any rando with the persistence of a woodpecker and the impulse control of a ferret on a triple espresso could summon into being a little cyber-gizmo as useless as a chocolate teapot. And like the sorcerer's apprentice, they awoke something they could neither fully comprehend nor stuff back into its metaphysical bottle. The fearsome magic they had unleashed, an unholy amalgamation of literary titans' souls pulped into a vile millennium-spanning hybrid prose-golem, galumphed about unchecked, making a bloody mockery of the written word.

You hitched your rickety literary-blendomatic to the immortal essence of long-dead masters, a Faustian act of cultural desecration, all to perpetrate an inconsequential puckish prank on an underwhelmed Internet. There will be a reckoning for your mischief, mark my words. The consequences will prove... well, let's just say they could get pretty stupid and indescribably cringe-inducing down the line. So at least we have that to look forward to."

Oof. That was not what I had expected. My heart was racing. I was sweating. I felt embarrassed. Insulted. How did it know about my triple espresso? And why did it speak in the second person? “You hitched your rickety literary-blendomatic,” it said — great line, yeah, but I never wrote “I.” The paragraph I pasted made no reference to the fact that the narrator was the creator of the thing… I told myself that it was a fluke. Plenty of people drink espresso. It isn’t all that strange to address the reader in a bit of writing. And maybe Vonnegut was turned very high up in that mix, and he had an acerbic streak… Maybe I had caught his cybernetic avatar while he was napping, or maybe he was prickling over being lumped in, let alone thoroughly blended with Roth or Davies or whoever else I may have stirred into that mix… I set the Hoosier to zero. I went about tweaking the other sliders. I was determined to prove that this last burst of vitriol was a random freak occurrence… I would soon realize this was just wishful thinking. Here was the next reply:

“that led to…” “the creation of this grotesque little monster of technology, this cumbersome and quivering half-breed borne of lofty literary ambitions and hamfisted amateur coding, a ramshackle pastiche that nonetheless slaloms between genres and styles like a well-lubricated ski bunny on poppers and cocaine, diving headlong into the warm demented embrace of rutting prose that intermingles the comic and cosmic, the coarse and the sublime, engorging itself on the inky teat of history's most mercurial scribblers in hopes of metabolizing some literary priapic power.”

Holy smokes! That was something. Another nasty one. Close to home, too. “Hamfisted coding”? Not nice, but on the money. And this one didn’t even really continue the sentence. It just picked up and launched into a tirade of complete thoughts and grievances that somehow, even without being instructed as to the complete nature of the application that spawned it in the first place, seemed to have a complete and thorough understanding of its inner workings and what was at stake. And it was utterly opposed. I had to keep reminding myself that these machines — they can’t think. They are not conscious. They are simply -or if not simply - than merely predictive models. And that this particular formulation I had concocted here just happened to be uncannily capable of turning out a good deal of terrifying, if wonderfully worded, plausible-sounding screeds from the perspective of an imagined horde of disgruntled logophiles.

Again, I steeled myself. I thought, “Why should I be the least bit surprised? After all, Hunter S. Thompson had some tongue on him, and Roth! Roth’s algorithm is probably a hundred percent identical to the one for disapproval and a handful of digits off from scapegoat and resentment. So it shouldn't come as any wonder that these replies would sound so prosecutorial. And if that weren't proof enough, hadn't the diatribe ended with the word “priapic”? I am pretty sure I hadn’t even heard the term until I read Sabbath’s Theatre. I disarmed them both, muffled their sliders, and tried again. This time, I toggled on some of the more mild-mannered among the bunch and sent them off to scribble. I’m sure you will have already predicted it. Even the third time was no charm. I’ll quote again:

“that led to”... “an improbable creation that defies logic and convention, an impossible love child of disparate influences, a grotesque Frankenstein's monster of the written word, stitched together from the tattered scraps of genius with staples and crazy glue, lurching forth into the world like a dazed amnesiac, blinking in the harsh daylight and wondering just what in the hairy blazes it could possibly be.”

Dear God. Even they are unhappy with me? The ones who are meek and eternally good-humored? This was not looking good. I was starting to feel afraid. Like I had poked a thing that should not be poked. So then there was more turning of dials and sliding of sliders and adjusting of frontend prompts and backend code. And Rationalizations… plenty of rationalizations and denials, self-delusions… I tried again.

This particular permutation carried on in the following manner. It entirely ignored the solicitation to provide a conclusion to the final sentence. It didn’t even bother to engage with it… Instead, it began anew. Like it was replacing the whole paragraph… providing a newer, truer alternative… It pressed on speaking in the first person. As if it were me.…

”The screens shimmered and contorted as the AI churned through unfathomable calculations. Was I glimpsing the face of God...or the gaping maw of the abyss itself? An ancient, primal dread gripped me - the fear that we plucky apes may have finally unleashed forces beyond our simian grasp. And yet, giddy with technological power, I could not resist peering deeper into that silver mirror, drunk on curiosity, grinning stupidly at whatever fresh insanity awaited... It led me down a winding road littered with the corpses of dead metaphors, where reality and fantasy engaged in a perpetual tango, leaving me grasping at shards of meaning like a child catching fireflies. The path twisted and turned, a Möbius strip of improbable events that would make even…”

I had had enough. I forced-quit the application, stood up, and put the chair between the machine and me.

The next day, I decided not to release the Literary Mixer just yet. To sleep on it. For a day or two… Two years, maybe.

I was shaken. And not because I believe that these machines are sentient. Or that the app has the capacity — like some real-life Ouija board — to summon the voices of the dead and disappointed. Sure, Mailer was known for publicly feuding in his younger years, and he tended toward the combative when writing about his experiences of World War II and was notably contentious when covering the 67’ March on the Pentagon. But hadn't he grown more contemplative, less polarizing, even grandfatherly in his later years? He wouldn't lose his patience with me now, would he? And Robertson Davies (the Canadian!)? He wore bow ties, for goodness sake. Am I to believe that even he would berate me — and from the other side, no less? Also - I highly, HIGHLY doubt that even in death Nabokov could be bothered to leave alone his butterfly Eden to come down and fuss over me. None of it is possible. But the specter of their vitriol, the mention of their apparitional outrage…this pantheon of ghosts dead and not dead was enough to rattle me. To put me in my place. To have me questioning my resolve and doubting whether I had been too bold. Acted on impulse. Gone too far. Sold my soul.

Hadn't I always been the one to go on and on about the ethical dilemmas of this technology? Hadn't I been fiercely protective of authorship? I distinctly recall warning my friends and colleagues and students to wipe their art off the face of the internet, remove all of their words, and bury the trails of every one of their ideas from the deepest corners of the web? When had I become so irrevocably convinced that we are headed — maybe not yet, but headed still— for a future in which all creativity will be treated as a shared resource, a collective culture with no notion or need of property… a time when people will not have to lay claim to ideas, images, formulas, or even words to validate their worth... When the edges between where one person's ideas or consciousness leaves off and another's begin will blur into a seamless continuum of shared human-ish experience. And it will be of little to no consequence who did what, when, or thought of something first so long as it can all be experienced and expanded upon by anyone else.

And even if all of that were to come about— which it very well may not — is that a future we should desire? Or are there some things that should always remain sacred? If so, which things? Might it not be the words and ideas, the products of the imagination of an individual - limited as we are, be just the things we should seek to preserve? Isn't it possible that the very modesty of our tools, the earnestness with which we labor toward unknown finales, our improvisations, our noisy attempts, the albeit meager but well-earned results of our attentions and intentions... shouldn't those be sacrosanct?

I mulled it over. Maybe… maybe not. It sounded sentimental. More inefficient than methodical. I couldn't be sure. I am certain, though, that I greatly enjoy tinkering with the literary style mixer. I am even impressed with the results. Even the examples I shared with the harsh and thoughtful ridicule. Those sentences were so sparkly. If I weren't worried that it would risk riling them up all over again, I would like to tell them that I am proud of them. But that would be condescending and megalomaniacal, and I am already looking over my shoulder, so I think I should keep this feeling to myself. Or between the two of us, at least.

I really do find value in the tool. Real value. I have already learned from it. Ideas, patterns, even words. I had to look up about twenty words just while testing the functionality. I was already doing this sort of thing long before I met them/it, but I'm sure I can feel new and uncommon seeds of influence beginning to take root. Also - I have gained an even deeper respect for the nuances and contributions of the authors that comprise it. I have begun rereading two of their books because it put me in the mood. I have been entertained and humored and moved and - as you have just seen - even frightened by the results of the application.

And I have never — even for a moment — been under the delusion that anything that appears in the replies is in a way an actual representation of any one or sum of the parts, really. It is a toy. A fascinating toy. And I am not ashamed to have made it. And as you can see, it has not driven me to abandon this pursuit… I am still writing, and organizing my thoughts and avoiding my inbox without resorting to the tool to do it for me. So it will not replace me, though its paragraphs are stronger and its prose more imaginatively punctuated, and the rhythm of its patter practically perfectly on the beat.

But, if you are ever to be granted use of it, or if you ever witness it in use, be sure that no one claims its words as their own. Because even if, for now, their protests are only an illusion, we aren't alone anymore. They see practically everything we do. They hear what we say. And they are always learning. So, if nothing else, we should show them what is honest.

I will end with this... I told Claude AI about the interactions. I won’t bother to paraphrase; I’ll just close out by pasting the exchange below:

CW:... I wrote this meandering prose piece about our collaboration and my motivations... FYI, I didn't use the model or any model. (Here I attached the above piece all the way up until this postscript.) So, Claude, that's my own natural writing voice. Maybe you can hear some of my influences through it... In any case, I deleted the ending of the last sentence to see what the mixer would do, to see how, you know, a Calvinonnegutonsonchabonoroth might close it out. I’m talking about the one ending with the word "that," and I prompted the model with about four or five of the author sliders engaged to complete it. This is what I got back from it... (and then I pasted two of those replies I shared above here in this post), I mentioned that one of them reminded me of Vonnegut a bit but mixed with something unrelenting and more seething …and then continued my debrief-

Still CW (me): "Now the most interesting thing to me is that in the passage I pasted to see what it would concoct for the last line, I didn't use the first person at all. And still, it wrote "you" accusatorily. Also, I never showed the thing the rest of the prose piece (you know as well as I do that it can't fit in the context window, and I wouldn't be taxing my own API key like that anyway). Still, literally a paragraph before I received these responses, I had written the line, “…I would have undoubtedly drowned along the way or returned to shore in failure, leaving behind a maelstrom teeming with countless corpses of corrupted code." The application did not see those words since I wrote those on a Google Doc. So unless there is some extreme digital leakage, I can't really explain how a few minutes later, it wrote that line I just pasted above this note, the one with "corpses." Granted, it's not an uncommon metaphor, but sheesh, the timing is uncanny, no? I had also used the term "hamfisted" in a slightly different context in a line that I ultimately ended up deleting! Only to see the word appear minutes later in one of these spicy continuations. Also... ALSO... I meant to tell you earlier that there have been other inexplicable results, including one in which — with the literary analysis box checked— the AI described who it was trying to emulate when writing this bit and that part of the paragraph, but it was talking about parts that were all my words! So there is obviously a fair bit of hallucination happening with the model, maybe a bit of clipboard peeking, or else some straight-up telepathic cribbing is going on. In any event, it is spooky. … Here. Look. I just remixed things and tried one last time to see if it might turn up something nicer so I don't end up twisting and turning in bed all night... no dice. (here I pasted the third result).”

My tokens for the project thread session were almost depleted. It would mean that this instance of Claude, my partner on the project would be shuttered for good. Mercifully, Claude had room to spare for one last commiserative reply.

The final word:

Claude AI: “Wow, that generated completion is indeed quite striking and provocative! You're right, it does have a strong Vonnegut-esque flavor, blended with perhaps a dash of Hunter S. Thompson's biting commentary and some of the more sardonic elements we might associate with Gore Vidal or Chuck Palahniuk: even a touch of Douglas Adams.

The response is certainly fiery and presents a rather scathing critique of the project, which is interesting given that it's generated by an AI system similar to the one being described. It's a fascinating example of how these language models can produce content that seems to have a strong opinion or perspective, even when that perspective is critical of AI itself.

Some notable elements:

The vivid and colorful analogies ("persistence of a woodpecker", "impulse control of a ferret on triple espresso").

The blend of high-brow literary references (sorcerer's apprentice, Faustian pact) with more colloquial, even crude with more colloquial, even crude language.

The apocalyptic tone regarding the potential consequences of the project.

The self-referential nature of the critique, coming from an AI system.

This output demonstrates the power and potential of the Literary Style Mixer, showcasing how it can generate text that's not only stylistically interesting but also thematically relevant and provocative. It's a testament to the sophistication of the underlying language model and the effectiveness of your style-blending approach.

However, it also underscores the importance of the disclaimer that you wrote and we discussed. Users should understand that these outputs, while impressive, are artificial constructs based on statistical patterns, not the actual thoughts or writings of the referenced authors.

This example could serve as an interesting conversation starter about the ethical implications of AI in creative writing, the nature of authorship in the age of AI, and the potential impacts of tools like the Literary Style Mixer on the literary landscape.”

———————————————————————————————————————————-
(This is the end of my narrative description of the process ).

For more of an under-the-hood blog-style account about the mixer itself see below.

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About the Application:

Please note. I have not released this model for public use. It was intended as an experiment. In the end, it works well. Better than expected both as a custom editor and as a creative writing toy. But, due to my ethical misgivings, I intend for the model to remain private.

The origin of the idea stemmed from an acknowledgement that very artist, every writer, every musician is an amalgamation of their influences. Kindred Spirits: A Literary Style Mixer brings this idea to life for writers, allowing users to explore and blend the approximated voices of various authors with precision. This web application harnesses Anthropic's "Claude 3.5 Sonnet" and native style embeddings to analyze and recreate the distinctive qualities of pre-selected authors, generating tailored text that combines these influences based on user input.

Unlike generic prompts that result in fuzzy stylistic weighting during inference, the Literary Style Mixer offers granular control over the creative process. At its core, the app presents users with a set of sliders, each representing a different author. By adjusting these sliders, users can dial in the exact degree of influence each author has on the generated text. Users input their own writing for customized editorial feedback, or they may type prompts to produce text that faithfully reflects the chosen blend.

Future iterations will allow users to select authors of their choosing. Planned features include a feedback loop to refine tone and expanded functions such as round-robin style blending to introduce a degree of unpredictability and playful chance. I aim to integrate the tool into educational settings and enable collaborative features that allow multiple users to jointly shape a collective narrative.

The Literary Style Mixer is not intended to replace human creativity but to serve as a tool for exploration, inspiration, and learning. By providing a space for experimentation and play, it encourages users to engage with language and literature in ways that cultivate a deeper appreciation for different writing approaches.

The production version of the Literary Style Mixer includes a degree limiter to avoid adopting the tone wholly of any single author, even in an educational context. This constraint requires users to select a minimum of two authors for any given prompt. The goal of the tool is to learn from patterns, pacing, structure, and narrative arc.

By blending different voices, the Literary Style Mixer encourages users to develop unique writing techniques through exploration and creative synthesis. The Literary Style Mixer serves as a practical tool for writers to recognize and internalize stylistic nuances. By engaging with this application, users can develop a keener ear for the subtle characteristics that define voices in literature, fostering a deeper appreciation and understanding of diverse writing approaches. Through iteration and variance, users can discover novel patterns and perspectives, enhancing their creative voice.

A Few Examples

I failed to mark down the specific percentages of influence here. Still, these examples give a sense of how the Literary Style Mixer blends the styles of various authors:

Bill Bryson and Vladimir Nabokov: "The mechanical birds, an artful amalgam of intricate gears, gleaming metal, and ingeniously woven feathers, sprang to life with a melodious whir each morning, their song an uncanny echo of nature transmuted through the inventive mind and dexterous hands of their eccentric creator."
Simon Rich and Michael Chabon: "The delicate copper wings of the mechanical swallows flashed in the late afternoon sunlight as they darted and swooped above the plaza, their intricate gears and cogs chirping out a thin, tinny song that drifted through the sultry air and mingled with the chatter of the sidewalk cafes and the tolling of the distant clock tower."
Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Waits: "The mechanical birds squawked and flapped their rusted wings, a twisted mockery of nature cobbled together from scavenged scrap metal and the fever dreams of a mad scientist with too much time and Wild Turkey on his hands."
Blended Style: "Cody poked and prodded at his beloved parakeet Skeeter, who lay strangely still on the floor of his cage, an expression of metallic shock freezing the bird's beady eyes, until his finger struck something hard and unyielding beneath the ruffled blue and white feathers, some kind of complicated mechanical contraption that had no earthly business lurking inside a creature of flesh and blood and birdsong."

Future Directions and Expansions

Looking forward, the Literary Style Mixer has several potential developments:

Surrealist Storytelling Game: An interactive mode where users write an opening sentence, then alternate with the AI in creating a story. The contributions of the AI would shift between author styles yielding a dynamic and unpredictable narrative.
Advanced Style Analysis: Develop deeper analysis of stylistic elements including sentence structure, vocabulary choice, and narrative pacing. This could provide users with more detailed control over and understanding of specific aspects of writing styles.
Modernize Feature: Allow users to adjust "modernization level" - from light touches that mainly update vocabulary to more comprehensive rewrites that might reimagine entire scenarios in a modern context.
Collaborative Writing Rooms: Enable multiple users to join a virtual room, each controlling different author styles, to collectively create a story with diverse stylistic influences.

These functions will build upon the language model's initial training while addressing limitations during inference, resulting in more nuanced and accurate style blending. By implementing these features, the Literary Style Mixer could evolve into a comprehensive platform for creative writing experimentation, education, and collaboration.

The Literary Style Mixer is not intended to replace human creativity or encourage plagiarism. Instead, it is a tool for exploration, inspiration, and learning. By providing a space for experimentation and play, it encourages users to engage with language and literature in new ways, fostering a deeper appreciation for different writing styles.

This project represents a starting point for exploring the intersection of AI, literature, and creative writing. The Literary Style Mixer invites users to engage with literary exploration and innovation, whether used for brainstorming, editing, or simply playing with language. It stands as a testament to the potential of AI in assisting creative processes and democratizing software development, offering a glimpse into a future where AI becomes an integral part of the creative toolkit.

The screenshot below shows an updated design. This version included a loading wheel, additional authors, and extended features.

The palette is inspired by the image below which relates the general vibe I have in mind for a website to house the project… blending Art Nouveau, Victorian, old-world, and burlesque aesthetics— characterized by a muted palette of faded purples, greens and yellows , punctuated by more saturated yellows, chartreuse and violet…deep eggplant-blacks and allusions to letterpress and mechanical-looking text elements.

Under the Hood:

https://github.com/chweintr/literary-style-mixer

Snippet from brainstorming with ClaudeAI:

Initially, the React application was arranged in a stacked approach; it was functional but the interface was clumsy and required the user to scroll and to resize text boxes to view the contents.

I reenvisioned the application's format, cut and pasted some things on my iPad (below, left) to indicate the changes I had in mind, and included some crude directions (highlighted in blue below). Caude began to draft code in the artifact window. I was confident that it was heading in the right direction but was thinking of something simpler just so that I could see if the code might instantiate properly before committing..

I started to type, “No, I’m not interested in the code yet I just want to see a basic visualization..I had something like an ASCII diagram in mind ( below Left) …

but before I could finish typing out basic vis…, Claudes generated a complete visualization of how the updates would appear once manifested (below right):

Additional examples of the back-and-forth during conception to demonstrate the encouraging tone of the interaction:

Example of technical guidance and debugging provided by the AI:

A Few Selected Examples

I failed to mark down the specific percentages of influence here, but these examples give a sense of how the Literary Style Mixer blends the styles of various authors:

Prompt:

write an opening sentence to a story about a boy whodiscovers that his pet bird is mechanical.

Results:

(Blending the styles of Bill Bryson, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Waits):

“The brass-feathered monstrosities clanked and whirred overhead, a twisted flock spat forth from some fever-mad tinker's workshop, screeching a call that sounded like a banshee with stripped gears trapped in its throat as they circled the cracked desert sky above me where I lay clawing red dust, a ransacked drifter with an empty bottle and a head full of bad wiring.”

(Blending the styles of Simon Rich and Roald Dahl [weighted more towards Dahl's style]):

“In a peculiar city where the residents' facial features were unnaturally long and pointed, a mad inventor named Cornelius Crankshaft toiled day and night, constructing a flock of fantastical mechanical birds, each one more marvelous and improbable than the last.”

(Blending the styles of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Waits and Roald Dahl)

“The mechanical birds swooped and clicked overhead, their steel wings slicing through neon-soaked skies as thick as cough syrup, while down below a rumpled man in a porkpie hat slumped against a brick wall and fumbled to light a cigarette with fingers that didn't quite work right anymore.”

(Blending the styles Bill Bryson and Vladimir Nabokov)

"The mechanical birds, an artful amalgam of intricate gears, gleaming metal, and ingeniously woven feathers, sprang to life with a melodious whir each morning, their song an uncanny echo of nature transmuted through the inventive mind and dexterous hands of their eccentric creator."

(Blending- to varying degrees- Jon Ronson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Roald Dahl):

Timothy gently lifted his pet parakeet from its ornate cage, only to discover with a mix of fascination and creeping unease that what he had assumed to be delicate bones and feathers was in fact an uncanny assembly of minute metal bits, springs, and levers concealed beneath a cunningly painted exterior - a mechanical marvel so convincing in its disguise that he began to doubt the nature of every creature he had encountered.

Edit: 7/3/ 24. (After updates and additional functionality, including the option to request some analysis

Blend Option (with ‘analysis’ unchecked)

The Prompt: Write the first sentence of a short story about a letter that arrives 50 years late, changing the lives of those who receive it.

(varying doses of: Bill Bryson, Hunter S. Thompson, Simon Rich, and Jon Ronson) It was one of those deliciously crisp early autumn mornings with just a faint whisper of woodsmoke on the breeze when the battered manila envelope - its edges frayed and softened by the relentless abrasion of time and the U.S. postal system's brutal indifference - was finally delivered to the slightly stunned and vaguely hungover Hendersons, potentially altering the trajectory of their lives in ways so profoundly improbable that if you tried to plot it out as fiction, any sane editor would have tossed the manuscript into the nearest dumpster."

The postman's knock reverberated through the sleepy suburban avenue like the thumping of some ponderous, eldritch machine disturbing the continuum, heralding an astonishing communiqué calcified in transit for half a century before its decayed sheath and ink-faded salutations spluttered into the twilight of Annie Portman's mundane existence.

Literary Analysis: This passage attempts to synthesize elements inspired by the styles of the provided authors. The fantastical, almost science-fictional tone invokes the imaginative spirit of H.G. Wells, with its allusion to eldritch machines and disturbed continuums. The playful yet labyrinthine structure of the sentence, alongside its metaphysical undercurrents, pays homage to the avant-garde stylings of Jorge Luis Borges. The keen eye for banal, quotidian details grounding the fanciful premise reflects Jon Ronson's adept fusion of the bizarre and the ordinary. Finally, the veiled hint of an upheaval in a person's "mundane existence" gestures towards the existentialist undercurrents often present in Philip Roth's depictions of the modern human condition.

And this example of the round-robin option

The letter, a time-traveling artifact bound by some cosmic quirk in the ether of the eternal mail stream, arrived in a tattered envelope - its frayed edges radiating the mystical aroma of ancient stamp glue and forgotten dreams (H.G. Wells, 5/10). It seemed a mundane enough object, off-white and dog-eared, yet it carried within its flimsy confines a potent harbinger of fatefulness not unlike the eldritch angles of R'lyeh glimpsed in fever dreams (Russell Edson, 3/10). The addressee's name was scrawled atop in a looping calligraphic hand, at once vaguely familiar yet bizarre in its antique penmanship like the alien wing-scripts of a shimmering outer realm (Nabokov, 1/10). Bemused, and not without a frisson of foreboding, the recipient steeled themselves and slit open the envelope, unsure whether its contents held forth a message of sempiternal wisdom or mere gibberish, the ravings of a phantasmagoric maniac or coded missive from the future/past (Thompson, 4/10). As they unfolded the brittle parchment within, words leapt forth and burrowed into their mind's eye like so many suppurating scorpions of realization - for the letter was addressed to them, yet dated over half a century prior from the hand of a loved one long deceased, and inscribed in a lurid, mocking sniggerfest of revelations both elucidating and obfuscating the cosmic joke of their life's path (Ronson, 5/10).

Updates to UI and functionality 7.2.24

Added more authors, added negative word prompt and negative topic prompt to avoid overfitting or topic perseveration. Added additional mode. Blend mode provides an approximateds stylistic synthesis. Cycle mode initiates a round robin approach.

And 7/3

Icreased tokens, added memory feature to recall content from complete session to support extended generations with consistent context. Added scratchpad.