ChatGPT has been refusing to copy the voices and styles of popular authors, Ars Technica reports. Indeed, we have recently seen posts on social media about the chatbot not letting users mimic specific authors’ writing anymore. Ars says the chatbot didn’t comply with its prompts to imitate the styles of both living and dead authors during testing. That means OpenAI has recently changed how it deals with such requests, as a recent study by publication No Latency showed that ChatGPT didn’t refuse them for dead authors. 

We tested it for ourselves and found Ars‘ observations consistent with our results. Upon asking ChatGPT to copy the style of Agatha Christie for a mystery story about a woman investigating the sudden disappearance of her husband, the chatbot told us it couldn’t do what I was asking for. “Agatha Christie’s works are still under copyright, so I can’t provide text that closely imitates her distinctive style,” the chatbot responded. However, it did provide us with writing possessing qualities Christie is known for. “I can certainly write something with those characteristics, while remaining original,” ChatGPT told us.

The fact that the AI chatbot still offers to write something with the same qualities an author is known for makes it seem like its refusal to copy Christie’s style in our test was just a disclaimer and not a hard no. Indeed, this could be a change OpenAI has adopted into order to avoid getting into more legal trouble and to fend off more copyright lawsuits than it’s already facing.