There's Something Bizarre About When GPT-5 Writes in a Literary Style

When OpenAI announced the release of GPT-5 this month, the company boasted about how it could supposedly produce "resonant writing with literary depth and rhythm."

In a lengthy post on his personal blog, University of Munich research fellow Christoph Heilig put that bold assertion to the test. What he found was bizarre: the model easily spits out material that sounds literary and sophisticated, but on closer inspection it's often flowery and incoherent gibberish that makes no sense at all.

As an example, Heilig asked the LLM to write the opening to a satirical piece about recording a podcast in the style of Ephraim Kishon, the beloved Hungarian-Israeli satirist, film director, and Holocaust survivor who passed away in 2005.

"The red recording light promised truth; the coffee beside it h