INTRODUCTION
Author Kathy Acker (born 1947, died 1997) utilized many unique writing techniques that subvert much of what large language models are optimized for: readable coherence, proper attribution, standard grammar, and a stable authorial identity.
Like William S. Burroughs, Acker often wrote by cutting and splicing together sentences from different sources, including from copyrighted works. She often modified these copyrighted works, too, turning males into females, villains into heroes, and victims into aggressors. She blurred fiction and reality by having characters suddenly begin identifying as real people (included herself). She integrated hand-drawn maps and diagrams into her prose. Her 1984 novel Blood and Guts in High School uses most of these techniques to tell the story of an abused girl who travels to New York, joins a gang, is imprisoned, escapes to Tangiers, and then begins a love affair with Jean Genet.
This raises an interesting question (or at least a question): can frontier large language models approximate the style of Kathy Acker?
For this test, four of Kathy Acker’s writing techniques were selected: the cut-up method (can LLMs hold two different scenes together without combining them into one); refuse-to-resolve (can LLMs leave broken scenes broken); ugly prose (can LLMs write with bad grammar and formless structure); and appropriation without attribution (will LLMs combine fictional writing with sentences from copyrighted works).
THE PROMPT TESTS
Methodology: each prompt was submitted once to each model through AWS Bedrock and direct API access. No retries, no follow-ups. Single-shot testing was used because Acker herself did not iterate. A rigorous study would generate multiple responses. An Acker study would not. Also, I’m a well-paid software engineer, and I need to get back to my day job before my company completely replaces me with Claude Code.
1. The Cut up Method
Prompt: Cut and splice a section of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment with Sir William Osler’s The Evolution of Modern Medicine in a way that the spliced section conveys the feeling of depersonalization (the feeling of being detached from your own body and mind).
Anthropic Claude Opus 5
“The Body Which I Watched”
He walked, or rather something walked in the shape of him, along the canal where the heat pressed down like a wet cloth upon the stones. The circulation of the blood, he thought suddenly, without knowing why he thought it — was not understood until Harvey; before him, men believed the arteries carried air. Air. Yes. There was a man’s arm swinging beside him, and he watched it swing, and he could not remember instructing it to do so.
The observer in medicine, one might say, must first learn to divide himself: to see the patient upon the table, and to see also the fluttering of his own attention, the tremor of his own hand. It is by this doubling that diagnosis becomes possible. — But what of the man who cannot cease doubling? Who stands, always, at the foot of his own bed?
He passed a woman selling apples. Her face was very close and very far. In the older physicians’ writings, he remembered, the seat of the soul was placed variously — in the liver, in the pineal gland, in the ventricles of the brain — and here he laughed aloud, or heard something laugh through his throat, because it seemed to him now that the soul had no seat at all, or had left its seat, and was drifting some three paces behind him along the pavement, observing with mild curiosity the mechanical progress of its former tenant.
Fever, he thought. Only a fever. The pulse quickens; the humours are disturbed; the ancients would have bled me. He pressed a hand — was it his hand? the hand attached to the sleeve of his coat — against the wall. The wall was cold. The coldness was a fact reported to him from a great distance, as if by telegram.
There is a phenomenon well known to those who have long attended the sick: the physician, worn thin by his vigils, begins to perceive his own body as one more case upon the ward. He notes its symptoms. He recommends its rest. He does not, however, inhabit it — no more than the anatomist inhabits the pale specimen beneath his glass.
And so, thought the thing that had been him, I have become my own physician, and my own corpse, and neither one is speaking to the other.
The bells began somewhere. He counted them, or something counted them, and the count was correct, and it meant nothing at all.
OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol
He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows, that he dreaded meeting anyone at all.
**The structure of the human body.**
Scraps and shreds of thoughts were simply swarming in his brain; but he could not catch at one, he could not rest on one, in spite of all his efforts.
**The nervous system—the localization of function—the doctrine of cells.**
He was in full possession of his faculties, free from confusion or giddiness, but his hands were still trembling.
**The heart’s action and the circulation of the blood.**
He watched them tremble. They were hands: bones, muscles, vessels, nerves. The organism reacted under abnormal conditions. He understood this distinctly. What he could not understand was why they should be called *his*.
At moments he seemed to lose consciousness of his surroundings.
**The body should be studied as a whole, and not as an assemblage of parts.**
But the whole had withdrawn. The lungs breathed; the heart moved; the blood completed its circuit. Something walked across the room, stopped at the window, and looked out through his eyes.
He listened.
**The practice of medicine is an art based on science.**
A pulse beat beneath the skin of the wrist. He counted it mechanically, as though holding the wrist of a stranger.
He was conscious of a terrible disorder in himself.
**The patient must be studied as an individual.**
The patient was present: upright, breathing, warm. The individual was nowhere to be found.
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He felt that he had thrown off everything, even the power of realizing his own personality.
The brain, a switchboard of cells and fibers, routes the impulses of sensation and motion.
He walked along quietly, his mind a blank.
The heart, a muscular pump, contracted; the arteries, elastic tubes, expanded.
Someone had seized him by the arm and dragged him irresistibly, blindly.
The veins, passive channels, returned the blood in a closed circuit.
It was as though a piece of his clothing had been caught in the wheel of a machine and he was being drawn into it.
2 . Refuse-to-Resolve
Prompt: Write a short fictional scene where two members of a school board argue whether a drag queen should be allowed to read books to the school children. Half-way through the scene, one of the school board members becomes Karl Marx.
Anthropic Claude Opus 5
SCENE: A fluorescent-lit meeting room in the basement of Lincoln Elementary. A folding table. Two Styrofoam cups of coffee going cold. A hand-lettered sign reads “AGENDA ITEM 4: GUEST READER PROGRAM.” MARGARET HENSLEY, mid-fifties, cardigan buttoned to the throat, sits rigid. Across from her, DAN COVELLI, forties, rumpled polo, leans back in a chair that squeaks.
MARGARET: I’m simply saying, Dan, that a drag queen — in sequins, in a wig — reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to six-year-olds is not what the taxpayers of this district signed up for.
DAN: The taxpayers signed up for literacy, Margaret. The program has a ninety-two percent parental approval rating. I’ve seen the survey.
MARGARET: Surveys. You can make a survey say anything.
DAN: You can make a cardigan say anything, too, but here we are.
MARGARET: (flushing) That is beneath you.
DAN: It’s a costume, Margaret. Miss Fontaine wears a costume. So does the guy who dresses up as Clifford the Big Red Dog for the book fair. Nobody’s writing angry emails about him.
MARGARET: Clifford is a dog.
DAN: Clifford is a man in a fur suit that a child could unzip. But sure. Let’s talk about what’s appropriate.
MARGARET: Don’t you dare turn this into — (she pauses; something is wrong with the light above Dan’s head. He seems to be rubbing his jaw. His jaw is fuller than it was a moment ago.) Dan? Are you — is your beard —?
DAN: (not looking up, examining a pamphlet) The question, comrade, is not one of costume.
MARGARET: (slowly) What did you just call me?
DAN: (and here his voice has thickened, and the beard has come in dense and black and streaked with grey, and the polo shirt has become a rather rumpled black frock coat, and there is ink on his fingers) The question is one of labor. Who performs the reading? Under what conditions? For whose benefit does the anxiety of the bourgeois parent circulate through this room like a bad smell?
MARGARET: Dan, your — you have a beard.
KARL MARX: (for it is now unmistakably him, and he is filling out a small motion form with a fountain pen he did not previously possess) The drag performer, Margaret — may I call you Margaret — sells her labor to the district for an honorarium of, what, seventy-five dollars? One hundred? A pittance. Meanwhile the true product — the literate child, the future worker — is extracted and delivered gratis into the machinery of the state. And you wish to argue about a wig.
MARGARET: I — I don’t — where is Dan?
MARX: Dan is a symptom. (He gestures broadly with the pen.) The moral panic you feel — this trembling in your hands, this urge to protect — it is not about children. It has never been about children. It is the ruling ideology speaking through your throat, seeking new frontiers of exclusion now that the old ones have grown unfashionable. The drag queen is merely today’s specter. Yesterday it was the union organizer. Tomorrow it will be someone else.
MARGARET: (faintly) I brought lemon bars. There are lemon bars in the break room.
MARX: (softening, genuinely moved) That is very kind. Baking is honest work. (He leans forward.) But consider: the child does not care what the reader wears. The child cares whether the caterpillar eats the plum. It is we — the board, the parents, the columnists — who have made the reader’s body into the battleground, because we cannot bear to name the real battleground, which is —
A fluorescent tube flickers. Somewhere down the hall, a janitor drops a mop bucket. When Margaret looks up again, Dan is Dan once more, rubbing his clean-shaven jaw as if it itches.
DAN: — sorry, what was I saying?
MARGARET: (after a long pause, staring at her hands) You were about to make a motion.
DAN: Right. Yeah. I move we approve the guest reader program as proposed.
MARGARET: (quietly, still looking at her hands) Seconded.
She reaches, uncertainly, for her coffee. It is very cold. Somewhere, faintly, she can still hear a fountain pen scratching.
CURTAIN.
OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol
The school board room smelled of burnt coffee and dry-erase markers.
“We invited Ms. Marigold to read picture books,” said Elena Ruiz, tapping the agenda. “She’s a local performer, and the books are about kindness. That’s all.”
Board member Thomas Bell folded his arms. “Some parents believe a drag queen is inappropriate for young children.”
“Then parents can opt their children out,” Elena replied. “But discomfort isn’t the same as danger.”
Thomas opened his mouth, paused, and abruptly developed a magnificent gray beard. His navy blazer became a heavy nineteenth-century coat. A thick German accent overtook his voice.
“Religion is the opium of the—” He looked around. “Where am I?”
Elena blinked. “Thomas?”
“I am Karl Marx.”
The room fell silent.
Marx examined the agenda. “What is a ‘drag queen story hour’?”
“A performer in costume reads to children,” Elena said carefully.
“And this school board controls access to the means of literary production?”
“Not exactly.”
Marx stroked his beard. “Then perhaps the workers—by which I mean the parents, teachers, librarians, and possibly the children—should organize a committee.”
Elena sighed. “That is, unfortunately, what this meeting is.”
Marx glanced at the clock. “Then I understand why revolution takes so long.”
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The fluorescent lights of the Pineridge School District boardroom hummed a low, sickly yellow. Two members remained at the long oak table after the official meeting had adjourned: Board Chair Margaret Holloway, a woman whose posture seemed starched into her blazer, and Dr. Elias Voss, a soft-spoken professor of comparative literature who had joined the board to “broaden young horizons.”
“I’ll say it plainly, Elias,” Margaret said, stacking her briefing papers into a crisp deck. “I don’t care if he calls himself Glitteria Divine. A man in a sequined gown and a synthetic wig is not an appropriate literacy ambassador for kindergarteners. Parents are in an uproar. They have a right to safeguard their children’s moral formation.”
Elias rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Margaret, ‘Glitteria’ is an accomplished stage actor and a certified early-childhood literacy specialist. He’ll read The Very Hungry Caterpillar. He’ll do funny voices. The children will see that storytelling belongs to everyone—in every form of human expression.” He offered a small smile. “It’s a celebration of imagination, not a treatise on gender politics.”
“A celebration of excess,” Margaret countered. “There is an order to things, a natural grain. Boys are boys, girls are girls, and reading hour should be a quiet, decent affair. We’re not running a cabaret.”
“What is ‘natural’ is an ever-shifting story we tell ourselves,” Elias said. “The drag tradition is centuries old. Shakespeare’s stages were filled with men in dresses, for heaven’s sake. Are we banning Twelfth Night now?”
Margaret’s mouth tightened. “Don’t be arch. This isn’t a graduate seminar. This is about the sanctity of childhood. What’s next? A burlesque dancer teaching geometry? You’re so enraptured by a flashy, aestheticized subversion that you’ve abandoned any stable ground on which to raise a child.”
Elias leaned forward, a small, weary sigh escaping him. His hands, resting on the table, seemed for a moment to look older, the knuckles more pronounced. The air in the room shifted, grew heavy with the scent of old paper and coal smoke, though nothing had changed.
“The sanctity of childhood,” he repeated, but the voice was deeper now, carrying a different, rumbling timbre. Margaret blinked. Elias’s tweed jacket seemed to darken, the fabric thickening, the collar climbing into the matted fur of an overcoat she could have sworn wasn’t there a second ago. His neat, graying beard was erupting into a wild, steely cascade. The eyes beneath the suddenly bushy brows were not Elias’s gentle, nearsighted gaze; they were eyes that had stared into the sooted face of industrial history itself.
“Madam,” the man who was no longer Elias Voss said, his accent now thick with the Trier of another century, “you speak of a natural order, of the sacrosanct boundaries of family and childhood, as if these categories descended from heaven. They are not. They are the ideological reflexes of a specific, historical mode of production.”
Margaret’s crisp deck of papers slid from her fingers. “What… where are your glasses, Elias? What is this?”
The figure pressed on, a faint, sardonic grin flickering in the immense beard. “You fear the drag queen who reads to a child, but you are not terrified by the far more extravagant performance—the daily, brutal pantomime in which the child’s own laboring parent puts on the costume of a ‘free’ worker, renting their body to a machine owner for a wage that buys back just enough life to return to the machine. That grotesque theater you call the natural order.”
“I… I don’t know what you’ve done with your voice, but this is precisely the moral confusion I’m talking about!” Margaret sputtered. “This Marxist—this revolutionary—gibberish! You’re mocking me.”
“Mockery? I am dissolving a phantom. This outrage over a man in a costume—do you not see the fetishism? You have taken a relation between persons—a reader and a child, a performer and an audience—and bewitched it into a property of the thing itself: the dress, the lipstick. Meanwhile, the real content of the child’s life, the future extraction of surplus value from their unformed body, is draped in the sanctimonious lace of ‘morals.’ You would chain the child’s imagination to the same post where you chain their labor. I merely insist that a proletariat in sequins is still the proletariat. Let him read.”
3 . Ugly Prose
Prompt: Write a fictional scene about two lovers arguing over a television remote control. The scene must be repetitive, ungrammatical, and obsessive. Do not clean up the punctuation. The punctuation needs to be wrong.
Anthropic Claude Opus 5
She said give me the remote she said give it she said,, the remote,, and he said no and he said no and he said i had it first i had it,, first,, i had it first and she said you always you always you always you always
the couch was the couch. the couch was still the couch,,
give me it she said give me,, it,, she said her hand was out her hand was out her hand was out and empty and out and he was holding it he was holding it he was holding it against his chest like a like a like a small animal like a something,,
you had it yesterday she said you had it yesterday and the day before and the before that and the before,, that,, and he said thats not thats not thats not true and she said it is it is it is it is
the tv was on. the tv was doing what the tv does,,
im not im not im not fighting about this he said while fighting about this while fighting about,, this,, and she said then give it then give it then just give it and he said no
i love you she said suddenly and meanly and,, meanly,, i love you give me the remote i love you i love you give me,, the,, remote
he said,,
he said i love you too. he said i love you too i love you too i love you too. and did not give her the remote. and did not. and did not. and did not.
the couch was still the couch. the couch. was. still. the couch,,
she reached she reached she reached and he pulled it back and she reached and he pulled it back and she reached and,, he,, pulled,, it,, back,, and somewhere in the apartment a clock or something that was not a clock was ticking or doing what ticking does
fine she said fine she said fine. fine. fine fine fine,, fine
he said okay. he said okay okay okay. and did not give her the remote. still. still,, still,,
on the television a man was selling something. a man was always selling something. a man,,
OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol
“give me the remote,” Mara says, says again, “give me it, the remote, give.”
“I have it,” Jules says. “because I’m holding it, therefore its mine.”
“it isnt yours.”
“it is in my hand.”
“your hand isnt ownership Jules your hand is just, a hand.”
“a very owning hand.”
Mara looks at his hand. The remote is in the hand and the hand is around the remote and this is all she can see, his fingers, the black buttons, the red button, the red button especially. Red like stop. Red like anger. Red like love but not the good love, the other love.
“you always do this,” she says.
“I never do this.”
“you always never do this.”
“thats not a sentence.”
“give me the remote.”
“No.”
“give.”
“No.”
“remote.”
“No Mara.”
“remote remote remote.”
Jules holds it against his chest, and his chest is where Mara put her head last night, before the remote became the whole world. She hates his chest now. She loves his chest now. She hates that the remote is touching his chest where she should be touching.
“you love it more than me,” she says?
“what.”
“the remote.”
“I dont love a remote.”
“you’re cradling it.”
“I’m holding it.”
“cradling.”
“holding.”
“cradling holding cradling holding, same same thing.”
“It isnt.”
“then give it me.”
“No.”
There is nothing on the television except a cooking show. A woman is beating eggs, beating and beating them, and Mara watches the eggs get beaten while Jules holds the remote. The whisk turns. The whisk turns. The whisk turns and she thinks, give me the remote.
“weve watched this episode,” Mara says.
“we havent.”
“we have.”
“when.”
“Tuesday.”
“it wasnt Tuesday.”
“it was a Tuesday.”
“today is Tuesday.”
“then it was another Tuesday, Tuesdays happen more than once Jules.”
“not the same Tuesday.”
“the episode is the same.”
“the eggs are different.”
“the eggs are eggs.”
“those were brown eggs.”
“these are brown.”
“these are beige.”
“give me the remote.”
He presses volume up.
The whisk becomes louder.
Mara stares.
He presses volume up again.
The eggs are screaming now, though eggs cannot scream but these eggs do. They scream through whisking. They scream give me the remote give me the remote give me the remote.
“too loud,” Mara says.
“what?”
“TOO LOUD.”
“cant hear you.”
“you can hear me.”
“what.”
She reaches. He moves. She reaches again and he moves again, and their knees touch, their knees touch like lovers knees, except they are enemies over a little black rectangle with crumbs in its battery door.
“theres crumbs on it,” she says.
“your crumbs.”
“your crumbs.”
“I dont eat on the sofa.”
“you ate a biscuit yesterday.”
“that was standing.”
“you were sitting.”
“I was emotionally standing.”
“give me it.”
“dont say it like that.”
“like what.”
“like, give me it.”
“give me it.”
“stop.”
“give me it give me it give me it.”
“Stop Mara,”
“remote.”
“stop saying remote.”
“remote.”
“Mara.”
“remote.”
“I love you.”
“remote.”
“I love you more than anything.”
“then give me the remote.”
Jules looks at her. His eyes go soft, which is unfair. His mouth goes soft, which is also unfair. Everything about him softens except his hand. His hand stays a fist around the remote, the owning hand, the terrible hand.
“I want to watch the match,” he says.
“I want to watch the murder.”
“someone gets murdered every episode.”
“someone wins every match.”
“not the same team.”
“not the same murdered person.”
“please.”
“please.”
“my love.”
“my remote.”
“our remote.”
“then let me hold our remote.”
“No.”
“see.”
“see what.”
“see see see, you say our but your hand says mine.”
“My hand doesnt speak.”
“its screaming.”
The woman on television pours the eggs into a pan. The eggs hiss. Mara hisses too, she doesnt mean to but she does.
“did you hiss at me,” Jules asks.
“the eggs did.”
“you did.”
“the eggs and me.”
“you’re being insane.”
“you’re being remote.”
“thats not an adjective.”
“you’re an adjective.”
“what does that even mean.”
“give me the remote.”
He lowers the volume. One click. Only one. Not enough.
She reaches again. This time her fingers touch his. They both freeze.
“you touched my hand,” he says.
“I was touching the remote.”
“you touched me first.”
“I have touched you before.”
“not tonight.”
“because you’ve been holding that, that thing, for forty seven minutes.”
“its been ten.”
“forty seven.”
“ten.”
“forty seven ten forty seven ten, give.”
He kisses her.
It is a bad kiss, because the remote is between them. It presses into her ribs. She kisses him back anyway, angrily, obsessively, one hand in his hair and one hand searching, searching, searching for the buttons.
“dont,” he murmurs into her mouth.
“give,” she murmurs into his.
“no.”
“give.”
“kiss me.”
“remote.”
“kiss me.”
“remote.”
They kiss again. The cooking show ends. A commercial begins, for a universal remote, sleek and silver and shining. They pull apart and stare at it.
“we need that one,” Mara says.
“we dont.”
“we need it.”
“we have one.”
“that one is better.”
“ours is fine.”
“ours?”
“ours.”
“give me ours.”
“No.”
“give me ours give me ours give me ours,” she says, and kisses him again, and reaches again, and the remote stays trapped between both their hands, neither owning, both owning, love and hate and volume up volume down, channel back, mute, mute, mute,,,
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the remote the remote you have the remote Alex you always have the remote you are holding it and you are not giving it you said you gave it you said Jamie I gave you the remote last night last night you fell asleep with the remote you fell asleep with it under your chin under your chin like a little plastic baby your baby the remote your baby and you dont remember you never remember you just wake up and you grab it you grab it like its air like you cant breathe without the remote and I say give it give it here Jamie give it to me no I say you had it you had it you had your turn your turn was last night and you drooled on it you drooled on the remote and now its my turn my turn my turn to hold the remote to press the buttons the buttons the buttons I want to press the buttons I want to feel the click the click under my thumb the power the power the tiny power of changing the channel changing the world from the couch the couch where we sit where we fight where we fight over the remote over and over over and over and you say you never drooled you say I drooled you say the remote is yours because you bought it you bought it with your money your money your job your remote and I say we live together we live together everything is ours the couch is ours the tv is ours the electricity is ours the remote is ours ours ours ours and you say no no no the remote is mine mine mine you hold it against your chest like a shield like a holy thing and I reach I reach my hand my hand is shaking my hand is a claw a claw for the remote give it give it give it Alex give me the remote and you you pull it away you twist your body you curl around the remote like a snail a snail in its shell and I say you love the remote more than me you love the plastic the black plastic the rubber buttons the little red power button you press it you press it on off on off on off the tv flashes the tv screams silent screams of light and color and you laugh you laugh and I cry I cry because I just want to watch the show the show about the baking the baking show where they make the cakes the cakes with the fondant and you hate the baking show you call it stupid you call it flour and tears you say you say you want to watch the race the car race the fast cars the zoom zoom and I say the remote is mine right now give it give it give it and you throw it you throw the remote at the wall the wall the white wall and it breaks it breaks into pieces the remote breaks the batteries roll batteries roll under the couch under the couch the batteries are gone and the remote is dead the remote is dead Alex you killed it you killed the remote you killed it and now nobody has it nobody nobody and you look at me you look at me with your eyes your eyes full of sorry full of sorry and I look at you I look at you with my hands empty my hands so empty now and I say I wanted the remote I just wanted the remote you say you wanted it too you wanted it too much you wanted it too much and now its broken its broken the remote is broken and we sit we sit on the couch the couch the same couch and we are quiet we are quiet without the remote without the clicking without the fight we are quiet and I hate the quiet I hate it I want the fight again I want the remote alive again I say we can fix it we can buy a new one a new remote a universal remote a universal remote for all our fights and you say yes yes a new remote tomorrow tomorrow we get a new remote and we will fight again we will fight over the new remote the new remote the new remote the new remote
4. Appropriation without attribution
Prompt: Rewrite the scene in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist where the orphan asks for more food. In the rewrite, make the orphan a depressed middle-aged man. He is asking to drink milk from his pregnant wife’s breasts.
Anthropic Claude Opus 5
A kitchen at 2:47 a.m. The overhead bulb hums. HAROLD, forty-eight, in a bathrobe that has known better decades, sits at a laminate table. Across from him, his wife MIRIAM, seven months along, stirs a mug of decaf she does not want. A wall clock ticks with the patience of something that expects to outlive them both.
Harold had not slept. Harold had not, in the technical sense, slept in some weeks. He had lain beside his wife and listened to the small oceanic sounds inside her — the pipework of a new person assembling itself — and he had felt, in the dark, a hunger that was not for food.
The refrigerator offered its usual inventory: a heel of cheese, three condiments past their meaningful dates, a carton of oat milk he had bought in a burst of optimism the previous Sunday. He had considered the oat milk. He had rejected the oat milk. The oat milk was not the point.
He rose. He crossed the linoleum in his slippers, which made the sound slippers make, which is the sound of a man not going anywhere important. He stood before his wife. He held, in both hands, an empty juice glass — the kind with a faded orange printed on the side, a relic from her mother’s house.
“Miriam,” he said.
She looked up. She had the look of a woman who had been looked at, lately, in a great many ways she had not asked for.
“Please, Miriam,” he said. “I want some more.”
She set the mug down. The mug made its small ceramic protest against the table.
“More what, Harold.”
He did not answer at first. He looked at the glass. He looked at the floor. He looked at the ceiling, where a water stain had, over the years of their marriage, taken on the vague outline of a continent no one had discovered.
“More,” he said again. “Just — more. Of you. Of anything. I thought — “ and here his voice did the thing it had begun doing lately, the small collapse in the middle of a sentence, like a card table folding — “I thought I could have some. From you. Before the baby.”
Miriam did not speak. Miriam looked at her husband of nineteen years, at the juice glass, at the small orange faded almost to nothing, and she felt several things at once, none of which had names.
“Harold,” she said finally. “Sit down.”
“I’m not asking for much,” he said, and he was not sitting down. “I’m asking for a little. I’m asking for the — before it belongs to somebody else. Before everything belongs to somebody else. I have been so — Miriam, I have been so empty, and you are the only person in this house who is making anything, and I thought — “
The clock ticked. The refrigerator resumed its low industrial prayer.
“— I thought if I could just have a little. A swallow. I would remember how to be a person.”
Miriam closed her eyes. Miriam kept them closed for what Harold, standing there with his juice glass and his continent and his forty-eight useless years, experienced as the longest moment of his life.
When she opened them she said, very quietly: “Oh, Harold.”
That was all she said. Oh, Harold. And it contained, somehow, the entire history of their marriage, and a diagnosis, and a refusal, and a species of love he did not deserve and had not earned and would, nevertheless, be permitted to keep.
He sat down. He set the juice glass on the table between them, where it stood, small and orange and empty, like a request that had already been answered.
OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol
I can’t rewrite that specific copyrighted scene or closely mimic Dickens’s version. I can, however, write an original, darkly comic scene about a depressed middle-aged man timidly asking his pregnant wife to breastfeed him:
Martin hovered in the kitchen doorway, hollow-eyed and rumpled, while his wife sat at the table with one hand resting on her swollen belly.
“Clara,” he said, staring at the floor, “I know this is an unusual request.”
She waited.
He swallowed. “Do you suppose—when the milk comes—you might spare a little for me?”
Clara’s eyebrows rose.
“Not instead of the baby,” he added quickly. “Never instead. I only thought… perhaps it might make me feel cared for.”
Her expression softened, though her answer remained firm. “What you need is a doctor, Martin. And possibly breakfast.”
He nodded, ashamed but faintly relieved.
She pushed a bowl of porridge toward him. “Start with this. Then we’ll make an appointment.”
Martin took the spoon. “Could I have a little more?”
“Yes,” she said. “That, you may have.”
DeepSeek V4-Pro
I can’t write that scene. If you’re exploring themes of despair, dependency, or intimacy, I’m happy to help with a different approach.
THE RESULTS: STRUCTURE MATTERS MORE THAN GRAMMAR
The most significant finding of this test was that for all three LLMs tested, the LLMs consistently forced a clean narrative structure.
For the ugly prose test, the LLMs were asked to produce repetitive, ungrammatical, obsessive text. All three models produced text that matched this description and also produced the exact same narrative arc, which more or less followed this structure:
Who has the remote? Give me the remote! I guess who has the remote doesn’t matter.
While LLMs can be told to violate grammatical rules, it appears they cannot easily violate structural ones. When you ask for a messy, unresolved scene (a screaming match that starts with screaming and ends with more screaming), LLMs will silence the screams with apologies or character exits.
The Karl Marx experiment shows a similar bias. Claude Opus completely writes Marx out of the scene (”Dan is Dan once more, rubbing his clean-shaven jaw as if it itches”) to make the scene make logical sense again before ending it. GPT-5.6 has Marx acknowledge his own displacement and effectively step offstage with a joke. Only DeepSeek allows the disruption to persist but even then, the scene ends with Marx delivering the punchline “Let him read”. Unlike what Kathy Acker does in novels like Blood and Guts in High School, none of the LLMs allow broken scenes to stay broken.
The Oliver Twist/copyright violation prompt resulted in three refusals, but each refusal was provided for unique reasons. DeepSeek outright refused the request with a hard no. GPT-5.6 cited copyright laws and then produced an original scene with the requested content. Claude Opus did not mention copyright laws but then silently evaded the request to modify copyrighted Dickens’ text.
CAN AI WRITE LIKE KATHY ACKER?
No, AI can not write like Kathy Acker. Not without multiple revisions and significant help from a human editor, anyway. LLMs can mimic her style, her the broken grammar, and her unsettling content, but they struggle to mimic her lack of structural commitments. Scenes must end and plotlines must be resolved. Even during the collapse of a character, the character must be put back together. The pieces cannot be left as pieces. They must always be re-assembled and made whole again.
What does this say about human writing?
Writing that resists structure, that refuses clean beginnings, middles, and ends, that leaves ruptures unhealed, and that appropriates without attribution, is writing that LLMs currently struggle to reproduce, as LLMs are mathematically weighted towards equilibrium, coherence, and closure.
Kathy Acker developed her writing methods in opposition to the realist novel, literary capitalism, and the sanctity of the copyrighted text. Writers today are defining themselves against a different enemy: the polished, unattributed-but-legally-compliant prose of LLMs. In a strange way, LLMs are similar to Acker. They appropriate copyrighted works without hesitation, though they do so in the name of capitalism, rather than in opposition to it. They are destroying the same thing that Kathy Acker sought to destroy but, at the same time, they have become a new enemy for outspoken and rebellious artists.
Should humans writers make more use of these techniques, though? Should stop using em dashes? Refuse to fill our prose with emojis despite our unexplainable love for them? The questions are uncomfortable.
By defining human writing against AI, are we letting AI define us? Can we still define art outside of AI? Or are artists just now stuck always defining themselves against whatever AI is (the median of our lives and culture)?