So, I’d been eyeing that meme going around since yesterday…
You know the one, the one where you plug in something you’ve written, and it tells you who you write like?
But I was starting to notice an uncomfortable pattern, so I decided to plug in some famous authors.
I started with people whom I knew were actually represented in the meme generator:
Hemingway
Margaret Atwood
Chuck Palahniuk
PG WodeHouse
Raymond Chandler
JK Rowling
Douglas Adams
Then I progressed to people who I thought were probable entrants in it.
William Shakespeare
Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
Geoffrey Chaucer
James Fenimore Cooper
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
Bill Burroughs
Franz Kafka
Mark Twain
James Fenimore Cooper
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
Thomas Jefferson
Ralph Ellison
Virginia Woolf
I hope at this point, you can see where I’m going with this. I started putting in the names of famous female writers, both white female writers and women of color, and posted up the results here. It’s completely unscientific and unordered, people are listed in the order they popped into my head to try.
Toni Morrison
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
Sappho
Dorothy Parker
bell hooks
Isabel Allende
Zora Neale Hurston
Alice Walker
Sandra Cisneros
Maxine Hong Kingston
Octavia Butler
Ursula K Leguin
Willa Cather
Madeleine L’Engle
Shahrnush Parsipur
Phyllis Wheatley
William Shakespeare
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
Shirley Jackson
Sylvia Plath
Arundhati Roy
E Nesbit
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Whose English translation did you use for Kafka? I suspect that Kafka’s best enjoyed in his native Deutsch, of which I understand very little.
To be honest, I’m no longer sure. It would have been a good thing to add– and it would be interesting to see if different translators got different replies.
So is JK Rowling not a woman now? Was Jane Austen not female? How about that famous man Margaret Atwood?
“We all write like white men”? Give it a rest. “Confirmation bias” would have been a better title.
Don’t you find it at all interesting that the writing styles of the names generated by the program are generally NOTHING LIKE the writing styles of the authors whose text is been analysed? All your little exercise has proved is that the algorithm isn’t very sophisticated, to say the least.
There are forty authors represented in the meme. Only three of the forty are women. None of them are authors of color. To me, that is a serious lack of representation and should have been addressed by the creator.
Oooh three women! I’ll shut up then!
This is a silly argument. The program sucks in general, so it’s not okay to point out specific ways in which it sucks? Give me a break. Is it suddenly not okay to point out when the Black dude dies first in a horror movie if the movie as a whole is terrible?
i would be happy to approve your comment if you did not include hate speech in it.
The day I search for bias in a useless internet meme is a sad day indeed
I agree. It would be very disappointed in myself if I actually had to make an effort to search for bias and just didn’t see it when it happened.
stupid bias, being so sneaky that we have to search for it. that giant group of white men and their token white women were sure hard to see through!
Your examples are all pretty funny, but I really lost it when I got to bell hooks writing like Dan Brown.
Just read an interview with the “creator” where he explains how he chose the authors…
Thanks for the link! Dmitry had already clued me into this himself– I wrote a bit about it in this post if you’re interested. I have another post on the subject here in case you missed it!
When I did it, I got “I write like Gertrude Stein.” So I guess you can add one more (white) woman. Still a troubling trend though.
He added her WELL after I made this list. He added a bunch more authors, which included some white women along with more white men, but last I heard, he still hadn’t added any people of color and he refused to take suggestions from anyone who brought up the inequity as a problem. Toni Morrison was one of the first people suggested to him publicly, and she did not make the cut the last time I counted, which was about a week after the meme was posted.