No, your AI chatbot cannot "write just like Ernest Hemingway"
but isn’t it pretty to think so?
The last thing I did before I left Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West was to go into the small tiled bathroom, lock the door and take a shit — I wanted to be able to say I took a shit in Hemingway’s house.
Because my blue-blooded friend Cathy says I have a Hemingway thing and because, at every opportunity, I like to prove to myself that I don’t. I get a little bit giddy when I see a somebody taking a public shit in Hemingway’s house. I got a little bit giddy when I heard about the writing app literally named ‘Hemingway Editor’ or about the Ernest Hemingway furniture collection and I chuckled when they ripped Hemingway in New Girl. I laughed-out-loud when I read that Hemingway’s granddaughter will slap the family brand/name onto any writer’s book for only $10,000. Because what are these occurrences other than instances of somebody taking a metaphorical shit in Hemingway’s house?1
And so I noticed a weird form of that old giddiness rising when I was at Musso & Frank’s (fittingly, a former Hemingway-haunt) for lunch last week and a friend told me that the hot-new chatbot, ChatGPT, can write just like Hemingway.
I asked for proof and so my friend pulled out his phone and asked me to devise a prompt. I thought about it for a minute and came up with the easiest prompt I could: in the descriptive style of Ernest Hemingway write a description of an Alpine train station in 1930. Here’s what it returned:
The train station sat at the foot of the mountains, surrounded by tall peaks that loomed like sentinels. The air was crisp and cool, the sky a deep blue. The station was simple, made of stone and wood, with a sloping roof and wide windows. The platform was empty, save for a lone conductor, leaning against a post, smoking a cigarette. The train whistle blew, echoing through the mountains, signaling its arrival.
Okay, it’s not bad in a technical sense.2 But it’s obviously not Hemingway. I could go on and on about why — Hemingway would never have had any mountains “looming like sentinels” or used the phrase “save for a lone conductor.” Those are words he may have used at some point but he would not have used them in that order. And the comma usage is all off for him. He simply doesn’t build paragraphs like that.
Here, here’s an example from an underrated Hemingway short story called ‘Homage to Switzerland’. It’s the same sort of vibe: alpine train station —
In the station cafe at Territet it was a little too warm; the lights were bright and the tables shiny from polishing. There were baskets with pretzels in glazed paper sacks on the tables and cardboard pads for beer glasses in order that the moist glasses would not make rings on the wood. The chairs were carved but the wooden seats were worn and quite comfortable. There was a clock on the wall, a bar at the far end of the room, and outside the window it was snowing."
Now, the Hemingway sketch is not noticeably longer or even markedly different. And yet when I read the ChatGPT text, I feel nothing — and when I read the Hemingway piece, I feel all of it, the rings on the wood and the cardboard pads. I see the clock and the pretzels and fuckkk, I can smell it in there.
I am overwhelmed with no-such emotions by the ChatGPT piece. The conductor leaning against the post smoking a cigarette is the only real touch and it’s a bland one.
And look, I started this piece by encouraging us all to take a shit in Hemingway’s house but when I wrote all that nonsense, I was talking about the myth. I think we should tear down the myth of Hemingway until he’s the new M&M’s spokescandy. But Hemingway’s writing is different, it contains a level of emotion hasn’t yet been replicated by machines. And I don’t believe it ever will be replicated by machines. The style has been copied by a number of men (Norman Mailer and Andre Dubus come to mind). But even those men were able to put their own emotions into their imitations.
And while I am always happy to egg-on ridicule at the expense of the Hemingway myth, I take his writing seriously. Because my friend Cathy is right. I do have a Hemingway thing. I’ve read all his books. I’ve read all his letters. I’ve written about him for LitHub. I don’t know when I started reading him but I know I was copying his dialogue by the time I was a sophomore in high school because I remember puffing with pride when a teacher that year accused me of ripping off ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’
I was just a kid then and I’ve since developed a dozen other things. I’ve got a Didion thing now and a Fitzgerald thing and a Camus thing and a Henry James thing and an Elizabeth Bishop thing. All those writers give me the good stuff. I read them and they just send me. I wish I had a better explanation but — as much as literary criticism tries to convince us otherwise — we cannot anatomize Hemingway’s techniques and replicate him in a machine because what he did is viscerally human.3
And I’d say it’s pretty to think that machines could replicate Hemingway. But I don’t agree with that either. The machines can do just about everything. But they can’t write like Hemingway because they can’t feel anything. And that’s what this whole thing is about.4
As I wrote this, I thought about a particular letter that Hemingway wrote in 1926 to Max Perkins where he’s defending tearing down Henry James in a soon-to-be-published book called The Sun Also Rises. In that letter, Hemingway writes, “to me Henry James is as historical a name as Byron, Keats, or any other great writer about whose life, personal and literary, books have been written … Henry James is dead and left no descendants to be hurt, nor any wife, and therefore I feel that he is as dead as he will ever be.”
Also, footnote to the footnote — there’s a great scene in Rachel Kushner’s novel Telex from Cuba where she has Hemingway at this bar and he’s asking all the men to dance with him. I laughed at that too.
This whole argument at this point is sending me back to Elif Batuman’s essay ‘Get a Real Degree’ where she talks about a lot of this stuff — and she mostly argues that technical proficiency, even technical mastery, is not synonymous with good writing. In fact, those two ideas are have become antonymous. Anyway, yeah. I probably agree with that.
Hemingway didn’t really like to talk about writing (or, he kind of did, but he was always claiming that he didn’t) but one of the clearest explanations of his magic comes from a piece he wrote for Esquire in 1935. In that piece, he instructs a young writer “find what gave you the emotion, what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling you had.”
And yeah, that sounds simple, and it is. But then again, Hemingway’s writing is simple too.
As I was kicking this around, I kept devil’s-advocating myself and thinking well obviously I can tell the difference between Hemingway and a machine. Because I’ve read Hemingway obsessively for years and years. But then again, isn’t the promise of AI that it’s so smart, it can replicate any human endeavor? Isn’t that what we’re striving towards? If you say your AI chatbot can write like Hemingway, I’m the guy you should have to convince.