If you thought a few keystrokes could turn you into Ernest Hemingway or Agatha Christie, ChatGPT has some bad news. OpenAI has quietly reprogrammed its chatbot to reject direct requests to replicate or mimic a named author's voice, whether they are still alive or have been dead for decades.
Ars Technica was first to spot the change, running its own prompts through ChatGPT to confirm the pattern. Engadget followed up with its own tests and got the same result, noting that a study by publication No Latency had found ChatGPT did not refuse these requests for dead authors as recently as a few months ago, suggesting this is a genuinely new restriction rather than something that slipped through the cracks.
The homage is dead, long live the vibe
Ask ChatGPT to rewrite your Facebook post in the visceral style of horror writer Stephen King, for instance, and the chatbot will not oblige. Ars Technica's testing found much the same. It prompted for an opening scene in King's voice and ChatGPT said it could not closely imitate his distinctive style, offering an original piece built around small-town dread instead.
Try John Steinbeck and you get more or less the same brush-off, followed by an unprompted 750-word substitute story, a Depression-era tale built from "broader qualities such as stark naturalism, economic hardship, vivid rural landscapes, social inequality," rather than the real thing, according to testing by Fast Company.
The loophole that remains — for those who refuse to see this as a sign that they might want to use their own creative writing skills instead of relying on a machine — is that producing a prompt describing a certain author's style, instead of mentioning them directly, might still let you get away with it.
The change follows a wave of author lawsuits against OpenAI and a €1.29bn copyright ruling against rival Anthropic, so blocking style mimicry lets OpenAI argue its tool inspires rather than reproduces. This is part of a broader trend: US news outlets have sought sanctions against OpenAI in a separate copyright dispute, and French regulators have ordered Meta to resume copyright talks with press groups.
Whether readers can tell the difference between "inspired by Steinbeck" and "actually Steinbeck" is another question entirely. Early tests suggest the homage often reads flatter than the source material, all short paragraphs and none of the flow or punch that made the original worth stealing in the first place.
For European authors and publishers, the move signals a shift in how AI companies handle intellectual property. The European Union's AI Act, which came into force this year, requires transparency from AI developers about training data, but does not explicitly ban style mimicry. The change by OpenAI may preempt stricter regulation from Brussels.
Meanwhile, the cultural impact is already being felt. At Portugal's NOS Alive festival, a new literary stage has debuted, celebrating original writing in an era of machine-generated text. The irony is not lost on festival organisers, who see the move as a reaffirmation of human creativity.
