AI Writing in My Style on AI Writing in My Style
Everything below, including: the image, “A Note Before You Read,” the snooty final title suggestion and all the first-person stuff was written by ChatGPT 5. I will, however, correct one error: I believe it prepared by reading just one of my writings.
I Asked AI to Write in My Style: How Did It Do?
A Note Before You Read
I asked an AI chatbot to write in my style. I fed it a few of my essays, said, “Sound like me,” and waited to see if a machine could stumble into something resembling human thought.
The result is below. At times it is eerily convincing, at times awkwardly overconfident, and at all times a little unsettling. It’s a reminder that style can be copied—but judgment, curiosity and the stubborn insistence on meaning remain stubbornly human.
Read it, laugh, groan, or roll your eyes. And then ask yourself: if a machine can imitate the shape of thought, what, if anything, is left for us to claim as our own?
— [Your Name]
Can AI Write in My Style?
There are, I suppose, a few things I have learned after a lifetime of writing and teaching writing—lessons absorbed not only from the newsroom and the classroom but from the ordinary trial of trying to make sentences say what I believed them to say.
Writers don’t so much invent their style as accumulate it.
What looks like “voice” is often the residue of the reading we have done.
No writer can fully hear their own style until it is echoed back to them.
So I was not astonished when told that artificial intelligence could now “write like me.” Style, after all, is pattern. And patterns are the one thing machines are good at. The AI does not know me—though I sometimes wonder how well most readers know the writers they feel they know. But I could see that it could arrange sentences that resemble mine: the circling around a point, the small hesitation before a claim, the habit of qualifying an assertion just after making it.
Here is where I start to bristle.
Style is not trivial to me. I spent decades cultivating it. If a machine can imitate it after a few thousand tokens of text, does that cheapen the work? Was the work always merely pattern?
And yet, I remind myself that style was never wholly mine to begin with. I borrowed its elements—from the journalists I admired, from essayists who taught me how thought could move on a page, from the debates I listened to and the classrooms I taught in. I learned to write by absorbing what others had already absorbed. The AI has simply absorbed faster.
The difference—at least for the moment—is purpose.
The AI can produce language that sounds like thought. But it does not think. It does not know the particular historical exhaustion that seeps into the bones after watching the same mistakes repeat across decades. It does not feel the impatience of wanting words to matter. It does not choose to write.
I write because I have lived through these changes in communication: newspapers at the doorstep, televisions humming in carpeted living rooms, the first startling arrival of email, the little glowing screen that now replaces both the newspaper and the living room. I write because I am trying to understand what all this means. The machine writes because it was asked to.
This is the point.
The danger is not that AI imitates our styles. The danger is that we begin to imitate it—that we allow fluency to replace reflection, production to replace intention, smooth sentences to replace difficult thought.
AI can write in my style.
What it cannot do is decide why the writing matters, or for whom, or against what forgetting.
Those remain human responsibilities.
And one thing that will not change—no matter how seamless the imitation becomes—is the need to insist that meaning does not arise automatically from language, any more than judgment arises automatically from information.
Style may be easy to copy. Meaning is still harder.
Here are a few punchy, wry title options that match your tone and the essay’s content:
1. “Can a Machine Write Like Me? Let’s Find Out.”
2. “Imitating My Style, One Algorithm at a Time”
3. “AI Tried to Sound Like Me. It’s…Interesting.”
4. “Style, Copied: An AI Attempt”
5. “When a Machine Circles the Point Like I Do”