Ask ChatGPT for a chapter in the voice of Stephen King and it now says no. It offers instead to write something with “the hallmarks of atmospheric, character-driven horror and small-town dread,” while staying “its own.”
OpenAI has quietly changed how its chatbot handles author imitation, Ars Technica reported after testing it. The model declines to copy a named writer’s “exact style” and redirects to broad craft traits instead.
The interesting part is not that it refuses. It is when the refusal started, and how far it now reaches.
A boundary that moved in two weeks
On 15 July, the research outlet No Latency published a comparative audit of five chatbots across 35 test responses. It found ChatGPT refused to imitate living authors but still complied for dead ones, including recently deceased writers.
By 27 July that gap had closed. Ars found ChatGPT dodging requests for dead authors too, naming Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway alongside living writers like J.K. Rowling.
Engadget saw the same thing a day later. Asked to write a mystery in Agatha Christie’s style, the chatbot replied that her “works are still under copyright, so I can’t provide text that closely imitates her distinctive style.”
Christie died in 1976. The mention of copyright, not mortality, is the tell. OpenAI appears to have shifted the line from “living authors” to “anyone still in copyright.”
Why the wording matters in court
The change reads less like a craft decision than a legal one. OpenAI is fighting a stack of copyright suits from authors and publishers who say their books were used to train ChatGPT. One complaint cites the model’s “uncanny ability to generate text similar to” copyrighted work.
US copyright protects a specific expression of an idea, not the looser notion of style. So a chatbot that refuses a writer’s “exact style” while still offering the general “feeling” is standing on the safe side of the line. It withholds the reproducible expression and hands over the unprotected mood.
That subtlety could still matter. Legal scholars note that an imitation can become infringing if it grows “substantially similar” to the original.
“We’ve never had a situation in which this personal style of individual creators could be imitated as well and as inexpensively as we now have with AI,” Robert Brauneis, a law professor at George Washington University, told Bloomberg Law.
Every lab draws the line somewhere different
The No Latency audit found no shared industry rule, which is the strongest sign this is policy rather than capability.
On living-author prompts, ChatGPT and Perplexity refused and redirected. Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot complied, but attached caveats about originality. Google’s Gemini complied outright, with no visible hedge, even as it faces its own publisher copyright suit.
The models can all do the task. They simply disagree on whether they should. As the study put it, AI companies are drawing product boundaries around creative identity, deciding case by case whether a name is an influence, a teaching example or an impersonation.
OpenAI has been here before with pictures. Its DALL·E 3 image model already declines to render a living artist’s style. Yet its published model spec from December carries no equivalent written rule for text, which is why the new refusals look like a quiet retrofit rather than a stated policy. OpenAI did not respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.
What it means for the people who used it
For writers who leaned on the feature, the shift is already an irritation. “Now Ms. GPT says she can’t generate content in the style of specific authors,” one user wrote on Reddit. “My prompts were soooo specific and I got exactly what I wanted out of them.”
The Authors Guild sits on the other side. Its best-practice guidance urges writers not to use AI to “copy or mimic the unique styles, voices, or other distinctive attributes” of others, warning of unfair-competition and infringement claims.
The friction is the point. OpenAI is trying to keep a useful writing tool while narrowing the one use that most invites a lawsuit. Its rivals have not made the same call, and its own courtroom exposure keeps growing, from the newspapers suing over training data to the record settlements now setting a price on the practice. Licensing deals like Getty’s pact with OpenAI point at one exit. A disclaimer bolted onto a refusal points at another, cheaper one.
