These original tests were run on the web app provided at https://author-style.demo.peltarion.com/ on 1/1/2020 and 1/3/2020, with a test done just before publication to re-confirm the results. (There was no change in the results over this period.)
Some results were originally run multiple times against the application to ensure the results were not due to some kind of web caching error or technical fluke. You should be able to run the tests yourself with identical results.
BATCH 1: Variations on a Nonsense Sentence
| Test# | Entered Text | The Author I “Write Like“ | Personal Remarks |
| 1 | The big black dog likes to eat peanuts, because peanuts make it break out into hives, and hives are good because they attract bees. | L. Frank Baum | The author I was identified as penned “The Wizard of Oz” so this actually seems on first look like a reasonable categorization; maybe it detected the use of absurdist thought? |
| 2 | The big black dog likes to eat. Peanuts make it break out into hives. Hives are good because they attract bees. | Mark Twain | Here I broke up the original sentence and reduced the length a bit. Note: if you add “peanuts” after “eat” in the first sentence the result stays as “L. Frank Baum.” |
| 3 | The big black dog likes to eat peanuts; because peanuts make it break out into hives; and hives are good because they attract bees. | Mark Twain |
Same as Test 1, only the commas were replaced by semi-colons.
Is the only difference between Mark Twain and L. Frank Baum semi-colon usage? |
| 4 | The big black dog likes to eat “peanuts” ’cause peanuts make it break out into hives, and hives are good because they attract “bees.” | L. Frank Baum | Stripped out the commas, added quotes, and abbreviated “because” as ‘cause and… we are back to Frank Baum. |
| 5 | The dog likes to eat peanuts because peanuts make it break out into hives and hives are good because they attract bees. | L. Frank Baum | Tested to see if removing the words “big black” and stripping out the commas had any effect on the original categorization; it did not. |
| 6 | The dog likes to eat peanuts because peanuts make it break out into hives and hives are good because they attract bees… | George Bernard Shaw | Took the prior test and added an ellipsis, and now I’m a totally different author… |
| 7 | The big black dog likes to eat peanuts—because peanuts make it break out into hives—and hives are good because they attract bees. | Henry David Thoreau | Re-added “big black”, added an arguably improper em-dash, and now I’m Thoreau. |
| 8 | The big black dog likes to eat peanuts — because peanuts make it break out into hives — and hives are good because they attract bees. | L. Frank Baum | Replaced the proper em-dash with the alternative double-en-dash and I’m Baum again. |
From the above results, there is reason to think that the AI has determined that punctuation makes an author. I’m not entirely sure that’s true, so I added some noise into the text to see how the algorithm responded.