arXiv:2510.13939v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The use of copyrighted books for training AI models has led to numerous lawsuits from authors concerned about AI’s ability to generate derivative content.Yet it’s unclear whether these models can generate high quality literary text while emulating authors’ styles. To answer this we conducted a preregistered study comparing MFA-trained expert writers with three frontier AI models: ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini in writing up to 450 word excerpts emulating 50 award-winning authors’ diverse styles. In blind pairwise evaluations by 159 representative expert & lay readers, AI-generated text from in-context prompting was strongly disfavored by experts for both stylistic fidelity (OR=0.16, p
