Staying out of trouble

In a “best practices” document published by the Authors Guild, the professional organization urges writers to “respect your fellow authors and do not use generative AI to purposely copy or mimic the unique styles, voices, or other distinctive attributes of other writers’ works in ways that harm the value of their works or attempt to profit from them. Apart from the ethical issues, mimicking a fellow writer’s unique voice or style could subject you to claims of unfair competition or copyright infringement.”

LLMs’ penchant for style mimicry has led to some prominent public issues in the recent past. Last year, author Lena McDonald faced widespread criticism when her book included an apparent AI-generated response that read, “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with [fellow genre author] J. Bree’s style…”

It’s not hard to find other examples of writers using LLMs to copy another author’s style in the years since ChatGPT’s rise. There have been multiple academic studies analyzing various LLMs’ capabilities on this score, both with and without fine-tuning.

When it comes to image generation, OpenAI prominently notes that its DALL·E 3 model “is designed to decline requests that ask for an image in the style of a living artist.” But an extensive OpenAI model spec published in December doesn’t include any clearly stated prohibitions against replicating copyrighted material or mimicking style in written responses.

Not all major LLMs treat these style imitation requests the same way, though. No Latency’s study found that Google’s Gemini consistently complied with requests to copy an author’s style, while Perplexity AI’s models consistently refused such requests and redirected them (à la ChatGPT). Somewhere in the middle, both Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot complied with the style-mimicry requests but offered stated qualifications suggesting “an awareness of the imitation issue,” according to the authors.

For some longtime OpenAI users, though, the changes to ChatGPT’s stylistic rules are already causing headaches. “Now Ms. GPT says she can’t generate content in the style of specific authors,” Reddit user Dazzling-Major-5620 wrote recently. “My prompts were soooo specific and I got exactly what I wanted out of them… I have no idea how to get around this other than maybe feed it prose I already edited that’s technically mine?”