Who Do You Write Like?

[soflabbwlvr]

I think this "tool" just generates random names. I tried it four times with four of my most recent stories and got four different results. H.P. Lovecraft, Neil Gaiman, Chuck Palahniuk, and Cory Doctorow. I don't think it analyzes anything before spitting out a name.

 

[PayDay]

I got Gertrude Stein, David Foster Wallace, Isaac Asimov, and H.P. Lovecraft:

So either the program is broken, or I am.

 

[patientlee]

Through some snooping I found out that this means you are Stephen King. Hello Mr King.

I tried it with different, and then overlapping sections of my Halloween story. J.D. Salinger, Stephen King, and William Gibson.

See? I was right. I write like me.

 

[callmeismael]

I ran a bunch of separate chapters of my most recent novel through it, and the two writers that came up multiple times were Arthur Clarke and Ursula Le Guin.

 

[redzinger]

I got H.P. Lovecraft for my blog writing.

Vladimir Nabokov a few times for a story. Hmmm.

 

[RoyceConnors]

Interesting 'tool'. In Blood of the Clans, I write like Robert Louis Stevenson and In Redwood 9, I write like Hemingway. In another work I write under, it came back as Stephen King.
I still think I write like myself and no one else. I never read Hemingway in my life and I never made it through Treasure Island. I have read a lot of King, but I can't think of a story of his, that reads like mine.
Interesting.

 

[JKendallDane]

For excerpts from three of my one-off stroke stories: Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and JD Salinger.

I can live with those.

For samples from three of my romance series: Stephen King, Issac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Those have me scratching my head.

 

[R. Richard]

I write like H.P. Lovecraft. Insane, there's not a single tentacle in my story.

 

[JackLuis]

I got differing results, depending upon what story I sampled, circa 2008 to 2013.

And it depended upon if I used a dialog or exposition as a sample, but most interesting to see how different stories tested.

 

[oggbashan]

I tried two:

Arthur C Clarke
Kurt Vonnegut

I am satisfied that my Kipling and Swift pastiches got the right answers.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Dan Brown - well fuck you too, textbot. Maybe because I had a crypt?

update: so if I paste in the WHOLE of my Halloween entry, I get Dan Brown. But if I post only the first quarter or so, I get William Shakespeare. The last half of the same story gets me Anne Rice, the last quarter is Ernest Hemingway.

I experimented with a few words that really should have produced HP Lovecraft. Can't just enter a single word so I repeated them a few times:

"Cthulhu" x 5 or "Hastur" x 5 = Dan Brown
"stygian" x 10 = Ernest Hemingway
"cyclopean" x 10 = Dan Brown
"squamous" x 10 = Ursula LeGuin
"vigintillions" x 10 = Raymond Chandler
"non-Euclidean" x 10 = Raymond Chandler again
"vigintillions non-Euclidean" x 5 = Chandler, BUT
"vigintillions non-Euclidean" x 10 = Mario Puzo
x15 = Arthur Clarke
x20 or x25 = Jonathan Swift
x30 = Nabokov

I tried it on excerpts from some of the authors it names. It seems to do very well with the opening paragraphs of their best-known work: correctly picked Clarke from "The Sentinel", HPL from "Call of Cthulhu" & "Shadow over Innsmouth", Swift from "Gulliver's Travels", Austen from "Pride and Prejudice", Bram Stoker from "Dracula".

But when I tried with their lesser-known works: "Lair of the White Worm" gives me Dickens, "Northanger Abbey" = Hemingway, "A Modest Proposal" = Defoe, "Medusa's Coil" = Margaret Mitchell, Clarke's "Superiority" = Lovecraft.

So my best guess is they've picked one or two pieces from each author, and their algorithm works pretty well at spotting an exact match to their reference pieces, but isn't really very good at matching styles beyond that.

 

[sr71plt]

My male-perspective bi Halloween contest story came out Gertrude Stein and one of my coming GM Winter contest stories came out J.D. Salinger.

I had to run five at random before coming up with a repeat. #3 was Anne Rice. #s 4 and 5 were H.P. Lovecraft. (which I find quite amusing)