5. THE FORGE OF STYLE

At this stage of the reflection, several questions arise, and I do not have all the answers. Can we really write quality texts with AI? Can we counter the blandness of the average and the drift toward cliché or ready-made formulas? And even if we do turn ourselves into machines, how will we earn a living?

Let us start with the aesthetic question. If all we do is open ChatGPT, write a two-sentence prompt, and hope the bot will spit out Pierre Michon, we are fooling ourselves. Ask the question: if we do not pull AI toward a particular aesthetic region, why would it give us anything other than blandness? LLMs are first trained to predict the next token — that is, to put it simply, to guess the next word in a sentence. Then another layer of training called RLHF — reinforcement learning from human feedback — is applied to align the models with certain human expectations. The chatbot is thus trained to give us the most probable response 1) statistically and 2) in terms of human values. If we do not pull it in a low-probability direction and it does not know our particular expectations, it must give a response that approximates the average, since it is in that extreme-center zone, so to speak, that it has the least chance of being wrong.

If we wish to move into a zone of statistical rarity and unsettled values, there are advanced methods I will discuss later. Let us begin with the simplest method: the enriched prompt.

I am not very fond of the concept of “style,” to which I prefer that of “voice.” I will use it provisionally, however, to demonstrate the possibility of pushing the machine to mobilize stylistic markers that depart from the median zone.

I prepared three long prompts that I tested with two AI models: Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 (Anthropic) and Gemini 3 Pro (Google). To read all prompts and test results, click here.

I will discuss only one test as an example: the spontaneous prose test. For this prompt, I drew notably on excerpts from Jack Kerouac that are in the public domain in Quebec, as well as excerpts from my own texts — To the West (Vers l’Ouest) and Minor Fugues (Fuites mineures) — whose rights I hold.

At the end of the enriched prompt, I wrote what I call the “user prompt” — the narrative idea I fed to the machine. This is the most variable and modifiable part of the complete prompt: you can ask the AI to narrate whatever you want. I did, however, choose narrative elements — movement, night, voices — that suit the spirit of the spontaneous prose flow:

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.

LLMs are not software; they are non-deterministic organisms that are “grown,” in a sense. As such, responses remain unpredictable and will differ each time the test is repeated. Here are the results I obtained on one particular run, January 29, 2026:¹

Gemini Pro 3:

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 sewer-flushers, 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.

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 out 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 Pro 3’s Cobalt Vein is rather mediocre, I will grant. It reads like a patchwork of every cliché that comes to mind when you combine the words “car/city/night.” The strobe, the “white knuckles” on the steering wheel, the warmed-over leather, the wet blacktop, and so on. The image of the city as a “sick bitch” with “blue fever” is strikingly naive, as are the refineries turned into “asthmatic dragons.” And above all, apart from a few slight departures, the syntax stays fairly close to the average. Gemini does not seem to have produced an original synthesis of the excerpts; it mostly latched onto the themes, which activated preconceived narrative templates of the “road novel” and “noir” variety.

Claude Opus 4.5’s result, on the other hand, is far more interesting. Beyond the themes, Claude worked the syntax to forge bold contortions: “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…” No typographic differentiation between narration and dialogue: “and I was answering yeah man that’s fucked up.” Interruption: “but at the same time and he’d cut in like she thought.” Non sequitur: “she thought I was just gonna accept her apologies like that and the blue of the streetlamps was running down the windshield…” The image that follows, of diluted ink, feels a bit clichéd, as does the “phosphorescent sea creature” further on, but they remain fairly apt and are not nearly as saccharine as Gemini’s images.

Claude also handles very well the fusion of voices and bodies that the prompt called for: the narrator and Mathieu having “become a single mouth,” “a shared memory we’d fused together,” “the same laugh coming out of the same invisible throat.” In fairness, Gemini also described “sentences [that] devour each other” and “a monologue with two heads.” But Claude goes further when it deploys the image of fusion by stringing three verbs together without commas: “our words were overlapping intertwining devouring each other.” This hammering of verbs has nothing ordinary or bland about it: it is a prose of deviation.

I even forgive Claude the expression “electric benediction,” because it could not be more Beat.

The text ends on the words “all the way through,” by negating them, and therefore by opening them up: “nothing needed to be said all the way through.”

Some may fault Claude for being too “meta” — for saying “a single mouth” rather than enacting it in the utterance. In reality, it does both: as we have seen, the utterance passes from one voice to the other within a single sentence. And for me, the best literature is the kind that cultivates its own reflexivity, becoming at once language and an image of language. The idea of pure immersion in the diegesis is a novelist’s artifice; I prefer prose that reflects upon itself and says so.

I am not claiming this is great literature. It is a simple test. Still, if I were leading a writing workshop, gave this kind of prompt to the participants, and one of them handed me Liquid Light, I would not be dissatisfied at all. When we know something was generated by AI, we tend to be more critical. If we ran anonymized tests with texts written a) by amateur writers, b) by professional authors, and c) by Claude Opus — if we organized a sort of “blind tasting,” if I may — I believe we would sometimes be in for surprises.

One thing is certain: the argument that AI can only generate bland prose does not hold up in light of Claude Opus’s performance. With a prompt that clearly establishes the writing constraints, you can push AI out of its median zone.

1. These tests were conducted in French. The texts have been translated into English using Claude Opus 4.6. ↩