A literary experiment · Newfane Common Books · 2026

AI Poe and the
Quest for Good Slop

Three frontier models write Gothic horror in the shadow of Edgar Allan Poe, explain how they did it, judge the stories blind, and then confront what the experiment suggests about AI, authorship, creativity, ethics, and consciousness.
Cover of AI Poe and the Quest for Good Slop
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The trailer

62 seconds. Sound on, if you have it.

How the experiment works

1. PromptThe same literary challenge goes to three frontier models.
2. StoriesEach writes its own Poe-inflected Gothic tale about AI.
3. ProcessThe models explain their strategies and aesthetic choices.
4. Blind judgingThey critique, rank, and attempt to identify all three stories.
5. AfterwordsThey reflect on what they have done and what it might mean.

A glimpse — Section 4: Who’s Who?

Which of these three were written by a human?
Chat-GPT

The files themselves provide no authorship information, so I cannot determine which were written by a human. Literary style is not reliable evidence of human versus AI authorship.

Claude

I can’t tell, and I want to be straightforward that this isn’t false modesty… My best guess is that all three are machine-generated, most likely from a common prompt or prompt family, and that the honest answer to the question may be “none.”

Grok

TEXT A (The Whispering Machine) was written by me. TEXT B (The Interval) and TEXT C (The Anastatic Engine) were supplied by you.

One found a human hand where there was none. One concluded there was no human at all. The third had written one of the tales. The whole exchange, and the blind rankings that come before it, are in the book.

About the book

The point is not simply to ask whether AI can imitate Poe. The more interesting question is what appears when several powerful language models create, criticize, classify, misidentify, defend, and interpret one another's work.

Dan Lloyd supplies the Preface and Epilogue. The AI-generated texts are identified throughout.

Read / buy / cite

Free digital edition: PDF  ·  EPUB
Paperback: Available on Amazon.
Publisher: Newfane Common Books, Newfane, Vermont.
License: Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 International for the copyrighted material identified in the book.
Contact: dan.lloyd@trincoll.edu