Can an LLM write literary prose?

Part of the series "One month of LLMs"

Forget novels, forget even short stories – can an LLM write even a single paragraph in a credibly literary style?

To find out, I prompted several popular LLMs to write short passages in the literary style of a particular writer. Here is OpenAI's o3 doing a Cormac McCarthy impression. (Prompt: "a man driving into the desert north of Las Vegas")

He drove through the last ragged suburb where neon signs guttered in the morning glare, their colors bleached to the hue of old wounds. Beyond the low-slung outposts of pawnshops and half-built condos the land fell away, a pale and trackless basin of dust from which the sun was already climbing. The two-lane blacktop unraveled northward like a strip of burned film, and the man guided the car along it, windows down, one hand on the wheel, the other resting upon the worn leather of the seat where a map lay creased and uncertain as scripture unlearned.

I like "pale and trackless basin" but the rest falls short for me. "Low-slung" and "half-built" are too obvious. "Creased and uncertain as scripture unlearned" sounds striking until you think harder about it. Why would unlearned scripture be creased?

Sometimes it starts off promising. This is Claude Opus 4 as Don DeLillo:

The screens went dark at 9:47. Not all at once but in a kind of rolling wave that moved through the trading floor from east to west, monitor by monitor, as if following the sun's arc in reverse.

But then it (auto)regresses into:

Outside, through the floor-to-ceiling windows, Manhattan continued its ordinary Tuesday morning, taxis threading between delivery trucks, a woman in Lululemon walking a dog the size of a handbag. The physical world asserting its dumb persistence while billions of dollars hung in electronic suspension, neither here nor there.

I can imagine DeLillo writing "the physical world asserting its dumb persistence" but I have trouble stomaching "a woman in Lululemon walking a dog the size of a handbag."

More impressive was Gemini 2.5 Pro's attempt at Philip Roth:

It was a Thursday, an affront to the natural order of contentious family dinners, which, in the Gerson household, were a Sunday institution, as reliably ruinous as my father’s digestion.

And later:

My father, enthroned at the head of the table, a geriatric king surveying his dwindling, mutinous empire, had already begun his nightly sermon on the moral and fiscal decay of the nation, a jeremiad that somehow always circled back to the price of grapefruit and the scandalous fact that I, at forty-two, was still renting.

This is pretty good. The metaphors get crossed (kings don't deliver sermons) but if you blink you might not notice.

I don't know if it quite nails Roth's voice, but it at least know what themes to hit. (Elsewhere it writes, "My brother, the cardiologist…")

When I asked Claude to make its Pynchon imitation ("The Torelli's Special Supreme growing cold in its thermal bag behind him seemed to pulse with an otherworldly significance") less obvious, it rewrote the passage and assured me that "the paranoia is more subtle." After a lengthy back-and-forth I managed to get it to produce the phrase "the miracle of telephonic food procurement" – but never a wholly satisfactory paragraph.

I didn't expect an LLM to one-shot a literary masterpiece. I suppose what I got was passable. All of this would have been jaw-dropping 5 years ago.

Still, these are statistical text-prediction engines, and they gravitate towards the most obvious thing. Driving north from Las Vegas? Mention the sun. Mention the road unfurling or unraveling or whatever. The window is either up or it's down and without fail the LLM is going to tell you which it is. There's a 70% likelihood that there's a map on the passenger seat, and if it is, you'd better believe you're going to find out whether it's "creased" or "sun-bleached" or "furrowed". The details are there but they don't add up to anything.

Here's actual DeLillo:^[Underworld, p. 786]

Some things fade and wane, states disintegrate, assembly lines shorten their runs and interact with lines in other countries. This is what desire seems to demand. A method of production that will custom-cater to cultural and personal needs, not to cold war ideologies of massive uniformity. And the system pretends to go along, to become more supple and resourceful, less dependent on rigid categories. But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.

We're still a long way off – for now.