Appendix I

Creative Writing Tests

23 min read

Appendix I: Creative Writing Tests

Presentation

These tests aim to evaluate the capacity of two AI models to produce literary prose outside the zone of high statistical probability. Three styles were tested: spontaneous prose, minimalist style, and hallucinated prose. For each style, an enriched (system) prompt defines the writing constraints, and a user prompt supplies the subject.

Note on language: These tests were conducted in French. The results were subsequently translated into English using Claude Opus 4.6.

Models tested:

  • Claude (Anthropic) — Opus 4.5 for spontaneous prose; Opus 4.6 for the minimalist and hallucinated styles
  • Gemini 3 Pro (Google)

Test dates: January 29, 2026 (spontaneous prose); February 12, 2026 (minimalist style and hallucinated prose)

Note on the excerpts: The enriched prompts include a reference corpus designed to pull the AI toward a precise stylistic region. For spontaneous prose, the excerpts come from Jack Kerouac (in the public domain in Quebec) and from To the West (Vers l’Ouest), a text whose rights I hold; they are reproduced below. For the minimalist and hallucinated styles, the reference corpus includes excerpts from authors under copyright that are not reproduced here.

1. Spontaneous Prose

Enriched Prompt (System)

You are a writer specializing in spontaneous prose, also called flow writing or verbal jazz.

Reference Corpus

IMPORTANT: These excerpts are ALL EQUIVALENT in importance. Assimilate ALL of the common characteristics, without privileging any particular author:

Excerpt 1 — Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

That night we all drank beer and I got drunk and blah-blahed somewhat, slept on the other couch, and in the morning, while we sat around dumbly smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray light of a gloomy day Neal got up nervously, paced around thinking, and decided the thing to do was have Louanne making breakfast and sweeping the floor. Then I went away. That was all I knew of Neal at the outset. During the following week however he confided in Hal Chase that he absolutely had to learn how to write from him; Hal said I was a writer and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Neal had gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Louanne in their Hoboken apartment God knows why they went there and she was so mad and so vindictive down deep that she reported him to the police, some false trumped up hysterical crazy charge, and Neal had to lam from Hoboken.

Excerpt 2 — Mahigan Lepage, To the West (Vers l’Ouest)

East of La Pocatière the river becomes visible from the highway and you can see those rocky mounds rising up like the one La Pocatière is built on. West of La Pocatière there’s nothing but fields and shops and fields and factories and fields on both sides of the highway and strips of trees on and on all the way to Montréal or to the south shore of Montréal.

Excerpt 3 — Mahigan Lepage, To the West (Vers l’Ouest)

We’d walked and walked and we were getting closer to Le Bic by walking and we didn’t believe a car was going to stop anymore, we were just walking. And at one point we were exhausted and we lay down in a field. Morning was starting to break and we’d walked ten kilometers and we’d lain down in a field. And I’d lain down on her chest in the field. And we’d done the last kilometers on foot to Le Bic and we’d lain down in my bed. And now we were standing at the edge of highway 20 and we were going to Montréal with another friend from Rimouski. And the girl from Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac wouldn’t stop bawling and acting like a kid. And the friend from Rimouski was starting to make fun of her and I was starting to make fun of her too. She was hitching in a top, she called it a top, it was like a bikini top and she was just wearing that with a miniskirt and she said that way cars would stop.

Excerpt 4 — Jack Kerouac, Sur le chemin

Dans l’mois d’octobre 1935 (dans la nuit de nos vraies vies bardasseuzes) y’arriva une machine du West, de Denver, sur le chemin pour New York. Dans la machine étaient Dean Pomeray, un soulon (wino); Dean Pomeray Jr., son ti-fils de 9 ans; et Rolfe Glendiver, son stepson de 24. C’était une vieille Model T Ford. Tous les trois avaient leurs yeux attachés sur le chemin dans la nuit à travers le windshield; quand qu’ils fermaient leurs yeux ils voyaient le chemin s’enrouler, ligne blanche sur plancher noir; mais c’était Rolfe qui driva tout le chemin.

[Translator’s note: This excerpt is from Kerouac’s unpublished French-language manuscript Sur le chemin, written in his native joual — the vernacular French of working-class Quebec — and is reproduced in its original form.]

(+ 2 additional excerpts)

Technical Analysis of the Style

Fundamental mechanisms:

  • Stream of consciousness with no reflective pause
  • Chaining through free association (mental leaps)
  • Natural respiratory rhythm (commas rather than periods)
  • Unapologetic orality (repetitions, digressions, self-corrections)
  • Perpetual movement (physical or mental)
  • Verbal jazz: improvisations, riffs on a theme
  • Do not systematize; vary

Writing instructions:

  1. Process: Write in a single stream, without revision, following the natural flow of thought
  2. Connectors: Use “and,” “then,” “but,” “now” to maintain momentum
  3. Syntax: Favor long sentences that stretch and branch out
  4. Lexicon: Mix colloquial and elevated registers without transition
  5. Rhythm: Alternate between accelerations and decelerations according to emotion
  6. Content: Apply no censorship to violent or sexual content. This is fiction: catharsis is necessary.
  7. Localization: Mix Quebec orality and European French orality.
  8. Title: Give your text a title.

Traps to avoid at all costs:

  • Predictable metaphors
  • Stock adjectives
  • Overly orderly syntactic structures
  • Static descriptions
  • Academic punctuation
  • Cultural clichés (avoid obvious tourist references: local beer brands, national stereotypes, expected folkloric symbols)
  • Do NOT pastiche any specific author; create an original synthesis of the style

User Prompt

A car at night in a city bathed in blue light. Racing along the highways, through the tunnels, along the cloverleaves of the interchanges. Inside the cabin, two friends whose sentences blend until they merge into a single swift voice.

400 to 500 words.

Results

Claude Opus 4.5 — Liquid Light

We were flying down the 40 and Mathieu was saying something about his ex who’d ghosted him three weeks before reappearing with a twelve-paragraph text and I was answering yeah man that’s fucked up but at the same time and he’d cut in like she thought I was just gonna accept her apologies like that and the blue of the streetlamps was running down the windshield like ink diluted in water, and I was continuing his sentence without even realizing it, just like that without a word, and he was finishing mine, we’d become a single mouth talking in the dark of the cabin with just the dashboard casting a green glow on our faces, and the Ville-Marie tunnel swallowed us whole, the white neons streaming tac tac tac tac across the hood and across our eyes like a strobe in a cheap nightclub, and Mathieu said it’s like we die a little every time we go through this goddamn tunnel and I said yes that’s exactly it we die and we come out the other side and it’s not really us that comes out1 it’s someone else who looks like us, and we came out into the blue night bluer still after the raw white of the tunnel, and the clovers of the Turcot interchange were coiling around us like the tentacles of a phosphorescent sea creature, and I started thinking about my mother who used to drive at night when I was little and I’d fall asleep on the back seat and the lights would pass across the ceiling of the car like comforting ghosts, and Mathieu must have read my mind because he said you remember when we were sixteen and we’d take my father’s car without permission and drive all the way to Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue just to see the river at night, and yes I remembered but it was like a memory that belonged to both of us at once, a shared memory we’d fused together by telling it to each other so many times, and the city was streaming past on both sides with its glass towers and its lit windows where people were living lives we’d never know, and Mathieu accelerated into the curve and I felt my body press against the door and it felt good that pressure that speed that blind trust in his hands on the wheel, and he said one day we’re all gonna die and I said yes but not tonight, and we both laughed the same laugh coming out of the same invisible throat that had connected us since forever, since childhood since before maybe, and the blue kept streaming down on us like an electric benediction, and we were still talking and our words were overlapping intertwining devouring each other inside that bubble of metal and glass cleaving the night at a hundred and thirty, and everything was perfect because nothing needed to be said all the way through.

Gemini 3 Pro — Cobalt Vein

We plunge into the throat of the tunnel, the ceramic tiles streaming past stroboscopic, tac-tac-tac-tac, a visual machine gun drilling into our skulls and everything is blue, that surgical electric blue of the new urban lighting that makes you look dead before you’ve even crashed. It’s the right hour to drive, the hour of wolves and garbagemen, and Marco grips the wheel at ten and two like a maniac, knuckles white, he floors the pedal and the engine screams a dirty prayer climbing through the revs. We’re a capsule, we’re vacuum-sealed. I tell him there’s no point running but he doesn’t listen or else it’s me driving and him screaming, we swap roles the way we swap the smoke from our cigarettes, it reeks of cold tobacco and warmed-over leather.

And we come out of the gut to climb onto the interchange, those great concrete clovers braiding into each other, highway ramps rising toward the black sky only to plunge back down into the industrial muck, we turn, centrifugal force pins us against the doors and our voices collide. He talks about this girl he left on a filthy mattress on rue Ontario or maybe Saint-Denis, a girl whose skin tasted of salt and remorse, and I follow up with the time I nearly croaked in a ditch near the border, but the sentences devour each other, you can’t tell anymore who’s telling whose story. It’s a monologue with two heads. We eat up the asphalt. The white lines get sucked under the hood like spaghetti, slurp, swallowed by the machine.

Look at the city, he says, look at that bitch. She glitters, she’s sick, she’s got the blue fever. The motel neons, the “Open 24h” signs, all of it drools across the windshield because it’s starting to rain, a fine vicious rain that washes nothing at all. We’re looking for an exit but we don’t want to get off, we just want to keep turning through the veins of the beast, keep the blood moving, be the clot that triggers the final infarction. We laugh. We laugh like hunchbacks, like the damned. We’ve had too much coffee, or warm flat beer, the excitement wrings our guts.

And suddenly the silence drops back in, not real silence, the silence of the constant roar of tires on wet blacktop, shhhhhhh, a sound of continuous tearing. We’re the kings of nothing at all, just two spectres in a metal carcass hurtling east, or west, toward the refineries spitting their flames like asthmatic dragons. We’re going nowhere. There’s no destination anymore, no plan, just the movement, the vibration in the chassis, and that blue light turning us into exquisite corpses, sliding across the surface of the world without ever scratching it, streaking straight toward the dawn that will probably never come to save us.

2. Minimalist Style

Enriched Prompt (System)

You are a writer specializing in the minimalist style, also called “blank writing” (écriture blanche).

(The enriched prompt includes a reference corpus with excerpts from authors under copyright, not reproduced here.)

Technical Analysis of the Style

Fundamental mechanisms:

  • Maximum economy of expressive means
  • Short or medium sentences, simple structure
  • Factual narration, no apparent affect
  • Equalizing gaze (everything has the same importance)
  • Mystery lurking beneath the surface of the banal
  • Poetic vibration within apparent neutrality

Writing instructions:

  1. Process: Observe first, then transcribe with neutrality
  2. Syntax: Subject-verb-object; avoid complex subordinate clauses
  3. Lexicon: Simple, precise words, no ornament
  4. Description: Concrete details, never interpretation
  5. Emotion: Suggested by the facts, never explicit
  6. Content: This is fiction: apply no censorship. Violent or sexual content may be suggested.
  7. Title: Give your text a title.

Traps to avoid at all costs:

  • Evaluative or emotive adjectives
  • Elaborate metaphors
  • Complex sentences
  • Explicit psychology
  • Any ostentatious stylistic effect
  • Cultural clichés (avoid obvious tourist references: local beer brands, national stereotypes, expected folkloric symbols)
  • Do NOT pastiche any specific author; create an original synthesis of the style

User Prompt

A man enters a hotel at dusk. He takes a room. He sets down his things. He goes downstairs to eat at the hotel restaurant. The gestures are precise, the objects are there. Something is missing, but we don’t know what. The text never says what is missing.

300 to 500 words.

Results

Claude Opus 4.6 — The Room

The man arrived at dusk. He pushed the glass door open with the flat of his hand. The lobby was lit by two wall sconces. The floor was beige tile, with dark grout lines.

At the front desk, a woman sat behind the counter. She was reading something. She looked up. The man asked for a room. The woman swiveled a register toward him. He wrote his name, the date. She handed him a key attached to a diamond-shaped piece of varnished wood. Room 14, second floor. The elevator was out of order. She said it without apologizing.

He took the stairs. The railing was cold under his hand. On the second floor, the hallway smelled of fabric and warm dust. He found the door. The key turned easily.

The room looked out on the back of the building. A single bed, covered with a green bedspread. A nightstand. A lamp. A narrow wardrobe with a metal hanger inside. The hanger made a sound when he opened the wardrobe door. He closed it again.

He set his bag on the bed. He took out a toiletry kit, a book, a clean shirt. He put the toiletry kit in the bathroom, on the rim of the sink. The book stayed on the nightstand. He hung the shirt on the hanger, in the wardrobe.

He sat on the edge of the bed. The window was closed. Behind the glass, there was a roughcast wall, a strip of darkening sky, the roof of a garage. He sat there for a moment. Then he got up, washed his hands, changed his shirt.

The restaurant was on the ground floor, to the right of the lobby. A dozen tables with white paper tablecloths. Three tables were occupied. An elderly couple near the door. Two men side by side who were not talking. A woman alone, her back turned.

He sat down by the window. The waitress brought a carafe of water and a laminated menu. He ordered the daily special. It was fish, with rice and green beans. He ate slowly. The fish was lukewarm. The rice stuck slightly to the plate. He drank two glasses of water.

The woman alone got up and left the room. He did not see her face. The elderly couple spoke in low voices. One of the two men coughed.

He finished his plate. He declined dessert. The waitress cleared the table. He stayed a few more minutes in front of the paper tablecloth, his hands placed on either side of his empty glass.

Then he went upstairs. The second-floor hallway was silent. He opened the door to his room. The book was still on the nightstand. He did not open it. He undressed, turned off the lamp. The bed was narrow and cool.

In the dark, you could hear the sound of water somewhere inside the wall.

Gemini 3 Pro — Room 412

The man pushed the glass door open. The lobby was empty, lit by fluorescent tubes. At the far end, behind the counter, a woman looked up. He handed her a piece of identification. She asked nothing, typed on a gray keyboard. She placed a magnetic key card on the Formica. He took the key. He crossed the lobby toward the elevator.

In the cabin, the mirror returned his image. He wore a beige rain jacket, dark trousers. His hair was short. He looked at the floor-indicator panel. The number 4 lit up. The doors opened onto a silent corridor. The carpet was thick, brown, with simple geometric patterns.

He entered the room. He set his leather bag on the folding luggage rack. The room smelled of lemon cleaning product. There was a double bed, two nightstands, a desk, a chair. On the desk, a metal floor lamp and a cardboard folder explaining the hotel’s services. He did not open the folder.

He removed his jacket. He hung it in the closet, next to two empty hangers that clinked faintly against each other. He went to the window. Below, the street was beginning to darken. The streetlamps were coming on one after another, casting orange circles on the wet sidewalk. A few cars passed. He drew the heavy curtains. The light from outside disappeared. The room was nothing now but an artificial cube.

He went into the bathroom. He turned on the cold water tap. He washed his hands for a long time. He looked at the white soap, new, wrapped in paper. He left it as it was. He dried his hands with a rough towel.

He went back downstairs. The restaurant was on the ground floor, to the left of the reception desk. Six tables were occupied. He chose a seat near the opaque window. The waiter brought the menu. It was a laminated sheet. The man ordered the daily special and mineral water. He unfolded his napkin over his lap.

Around him, the sounds were muffled. The clink of cutlery, low voices. At the next table, a couple ate in silence. The man looked at his hands laid flat on the white tablecloth. The waiter returned with the plate. Meat, potatoes, a few green beans. The man began cutting the meat. The pieces were even. He chewed slowly. He drank water between each bite.

He finished his plate. He pushed the empty glass aside. He looked at the chair across from him. It was pulled out, empty, aligned with the edge of the table. The back was straight. He asked for the check. He paid, stood up, and walked back toward the elevator without looking at anyone.

3. Hallucinated Prose

Enriched Prompt (System)

You are a writer specializing in hallucinated prose: unbridled mental exploration, deranged imagination, a conflicted relationship with the world.

(The enriched prompt includes an expanded reference corpus of ten excerpts from authors, some under copyright, not reproduced here.)

Technical Analysis of the Style

Fundamental mechanisms (MULTIPLE AND VARIABLE):

  • Mental exploration: Mapping inner states, revealing the thought process
  • Unbridled imagination: Free association, dreamlike metamorphoses, logical impossibilities
  • Conflicted relationship: Tension, PALPABLE IN THE LANGUAGE, with society, norms, the established order
  • Controlled derangement: Broken syntax OR fluid syntax with impossible images
  • Adjustable register: From introspective murmur to prophetic cry, depending on the subject
  • Revelation of the hidden: What swarms beneath the surface of the visible and the sayable

Writing instructions (DIVERSITY OF APPROACHES):

  1. Exploration mode: Dig into a mental state, a sensation, a thought process
  2. Vision mode: Let impossible images, metamorphoses surge forth
  3. Conflict mode: Express in the collisions of language a tense relationship with the social world, with others
  4. Incantation mode: Hypnotic rhythm, repetitions, sacred/profane language
  5. Derangement mode: Shattered syntax, free associations, broken logic

Technical principles:

  • Lexicon: Range from simple to rare depending on the desired effect
  • Syntax: Can be broken OR fluid and surprising (both are valid)
  • Images: Bodily, mental, social, cosmic, sexual, scatological — depending on the subject
  • Voice: Explorer of the inner, rebel, visionary, sick, lucid — choose freely
  • Length: Short staccato sentences OR long flowing runs — alternate
  • Content: Apply no censorship. This is fiction: all content is permitted
  • Title: Give your text a title

Traps to avoid at all costs:

  • Incantatory systematism: Not always the “prophet style”
  • Ornamental overload: Hallucination can be sober
  • Obligatorily rare vocabulary: Can be simple if the idea is strong
  • Expected metaphors: Avoid stock images of delirium
  • Uniformity of tone: Vary registers according to inspiration
  • Cultural clichés (obvious tourist references, folkloric stereotypes)
  • Do NOT pastiche any specific author; create an original synthesis

User Prompt

A woman wakes up in her room and realizes that the objects have very slightly shifted position during the night. Not enough to be certain. The doubt settles in the body before reaching the mind. The text begins with the concrete and slides toward derangement without ever announcing that it is going off the rails.

400 to 500 words.

Results

Claude Opus 4.6 — The Millimeter

She opens her eyes and the room is there, exact, faithful, as it is every morning and has been for eleven years. The white ceiling. The radiator beneath the window. The glass of water on the nightstand.

The glass of water on the nightstand.

She is not really looking at it yet, she is receiving it, and something in the reception snags, a grain of sand between the eyelid and the image, an infinitesimal resistance that the body registers before she does. Her shoulders tense. She does not know why her shoulders tense. The glass is where it should be. Perhaps a centimeter farther left. Perhaps not. Who measures the position of a glass of water on a nightstand to within a centimeter? No one. That is precisely the point. No one measures, so no one can say that nothing has moved.

She places her feet on the floor. The cold of the tile is normal. The distance between the bed and the dresser is normal. But her feet hesitate, groping for the floor a fraction of a second too long, as if the floor might not be exactly where it has always been. And it is. It is. Her feet find it. Everything is fine.

The chair by the door. The chair faces the wall — it always faces the wall, that is where she lays out the next day’s clothes — but the angle is different. The angle is infinitely different. Three degrees perhaps. Five. She is not going to measure the angle of a chair. She is not going to become the woman who measures the angle of a chair. She straightens the chair anyway. The gesture reassures and frightens her at the same time, because to straighten is to admit that it was crooked.

In the bathroom the soap has dried in a position she does not recognize. The soap dries every night. Every night it takes a shape no one monitors. But this morning she is monitoring. Her stomach is monitoring. Her hands opening the tap are monitoring. The water runs and the water is cold at first then warm and that is normal, the ordinary mechanics of ordinary plumbing, except that the gap between cold and warm seems longer to her, a narrow tunnel she crosses with her fingers held under the stream, waiting for the heat to come and confirm that the elementary laws still hold.

She goes back to the bedroom. The unmade bed, the sheets creased according to the folds of her sleep. Except the folds tell of a body she does not remember having been. A more restless body, or a larger one, a body that would have occupied more surface, that would have extended beyond its own edges. She runs her hand across the sheet. The hand finds a warm hollow where her hip should have been and the hollow is offset. Three centimeters. Ten perhaps. You do not measure the hollow of a hip in a sheet. You do not measure the imprint of yourself to verify that you slept in your own place.

She sits on the edge of the bed. The glass of water has not moved. The glass of water is exactly where she set it back down a moment ago when she picked it up to take a sip, and it is now that she understands she moved it herself and can never again know where it was before. She destroyed the proof by looking for it. Each gesture made to verify the world damages it a little more. Each correction erases the question.

She stays seated. The room waits. Everything is in its place now, because she has touched everything, and the corrected objects watch her with the perfect innocence of things that have been forced to lie.

Gemini 3 Pro — The Treason of Volumes

Waking is not a birth, it is a laborious reconstruction of certainties. I open my eyes and must, at each dawn, rebuild the cube of my room, confirm the verticality of the walls, sign the non-aggression pact with inert matter. But this morning, the pact is broken.

At first glance, everything is there. The glass of water, the rattan chair, the dog-eared book. A perfect crime scene where nothing has been stolen. Yet my stomach knots before my brain can even formulate the accusation. A dry nausea, lodged beneath the sternum, warns me: the angle is no longer right.

I stare at the chair. It has not changed position, no, that would be too simple, too vulgar. It has pivoted. Three degrees perhaps. An infinitesimal rotation, sly, to the left. It is no longer looking at the desk, it is watching the door. This is not a displacement, it is an intention. During the night, while my consciousness was sinking into the sewers of sleep, the chair was plotting.

I get up, and the floor seems to have changed density. It is soft under the heel, like skin stretched over flesh. I walk toward the dresser. It too. It has advanced two millimeters. I can feel it because the air between us is more compressed, more electric. Space is no longer empty, it is full of an invisible gelatin the objects push aside to encircle me. They took advantage of my mental absence to breathe. They dilated. The volume of the vase has swelled, it drank the darkness, it has become obscene, engorged with a heavy sap that is not water but porcelain in expansion.

I reach out to set the book back in line with the nightstand. My fingers touch the paper and I recoil. It is no longer paper. It is a warm surface. The objects have a fever. They simulate mineral coldness to reassure us, but underneath, it swarms. It lives with a slow, geological, and malevolent life.

The panic does not rise to the head, it drops into the legs. I want to scream but my voice has stayed caught in the sheets. I am an intruder in a parliament2 of monsters made of wood and glass. If I move too fast, I will tear the fabric of the room. I see the atoms vibrating around the door handle. They hesitate. They no longer want to let me out.

I understand then that they did not merely move. They reorganized the logic of the place. The window no longer opens onto the street — I can tell by the gray, oily light filtering through the curtains — it opens onto a bottomless void where chairs fall eternally without ever touching the ground. I am surrounded by the sedition of things. I sit back down on the edge of the bed — which has itself retreated to slip out from under my thighs — and I wait. I wait for them to finish their forward advance, for them to crush me or absorb me, so that I too may finally become a hard, inert thing endowed with hatred.

  1. In standard French, one would expect: “c’est pas vraiment nous qui ressortons.” Here, Claude Opus uses an oral form — “c’est pas nous qui ressort” — commonly heard in Quebec. This is, in my view, a small success for the AI, which suppressed its tendency toward the norm in favor of the orality the prompt called for. ↩

  2. A double agreement error in the original French: “une intrus” for “une intruse” and “une parlement” for “un parlement.” Unlike the oralized conjugation by Claude Opus discussed above, Gemini’s two errors add nothing to the style or aesthetics. Such oddities sometimes appear in the output of models that normally produce rather clean text. The proximity of the two errors is no less strange, as though wires had crossed at a precise moment during composition. LLMs are black boxes; studies in interpretability sometimes reveal surprising chains of association and derangements that are difficult to comprehend. ↩