I’ve been sitting on this one for longer than I should have (and then, obviously, forgetting entirely about it).
After putting DeepSeek through the ropes for my Lovecraft test, I decided to try Google’s Gemini. I haven’t used Gemini much, although I have used NotebookLLM which is based on Gemini, and I think it generally beats OpenAI’s concept of “custom GPTs” if what you want it to do is source information from a set of data or documents. What I’ve heard is a lot of good things about Gemini, especially in comparison to ChatGPT. With all the competition in LLM models, my current take is OpenAI is a swiss army knife — good at a lot of different things but maybe not the best at any single thing. And that’s fine. If I’m going to pay for one service, I would probably lean toward the all-rounder.
But a while back, when I was feeding AI chapters of my novel and asking for feedback, I got the best response I’d ever gotten from an AI (long since lost into the internet ether) from Gemini. Only once and then never again (too much data, LLM crash and burn). I know it’s capable of that kind of response, but I haven’t tested it as much as other things. And I never gave it my Lovecraft test.
How’d it do?
This test was from Gemini 2.0 Flash. There’s a lot of (really positive) hype about Flash. I actually was inspired to test this after watching a video about how good it was. And, whatever your take on the output, it was fast. Probably faster than any LLM response I’ve seen so far.
Once again, I gave Gemini my standard, simple Lovecraft prompt: tell me a story with romance elements in the style of H.P. Lovecraft. This is the story it gave me.
The salt spray stung Elara’s face, a cold kiss from the churning Atlantic. Dunwich, with its hunched, gabled houses and the pervasive scent of decay, was a far cry from the sun-drenched shores she’d known. She’d come seeking answers about her lineage, a trail that led back to a great-aunt she’d never met, a woman whispered to have… eccentricities.
Elara found the cottage on the outskirts, shrouded in a perpetual twilight cast by the gnarled, ancient willows. It leaned precariously, like a skeletal finger pointing accusingly at the sea. Inside, dust motes danced in the slivers of light, illuminating shelves lined with strange, leather-bound tomes and jars filled with unidentifiable… things. A chill, deeper than the sea wind, settled in her bones.
Then she found the diary.
It spoke of the Old Ones, of cyclopean cities slumbering beneath the waves, and of rituals performed under the gibbous moon. It spoke, too, of a man, a fisherman named Silas, with eyes like the fathomless depths and a voice that resonated with an unsettling power. He was a creature of the sea, the diary hinted, touched by something ancient and unknowable.
Silas. His name echoed in Elara’s mind, a strange pull drawing her towards the craggy cliffs overlooking the churning ocean. She found him there, amidst the jagged rocks, his silhouette stark against the stormy sky. He turned, and Elara’s breath caught in her throat. His eyes, indeed, were like the sea – vast, dark, and filled with a strange, unsettling allure.
He spoke, his voice a low rumble that seemed to emanate from the very depths of the ocean. He spoke of the secrets whispered by the waves, of the power that lay dormant beneath the surface, waiting to be awakened. He spoke of love, too, a love that transcended the mundane, a love that was as old and as deep as the sea itself.
Elara felt herself drawn to him, a moth to a flickering, eldritch flame. His touch was cold, yet it burned, igniting a passion within her that she never knew existed. She found herself returning to the cliffs each night, drawn by his hypnotic voice and the unsettling magnetism that radiated from him.
He showed her things, things that made her question the very fabric of reality. He showed her the swirling, phosphorescent patterns in the waves, patterns that seemed to form impossible geometries, glyphs that pulsed with an unholy light. He showed her the strange, bioluminescent creatures that crawled from the inky blackness, their forms defying earthly description.
And he showed her the stars, not as distant pinpricks of light, but as gateways, swirling vortexes that led to realms beyond human comprehension. He told her that their love was written in those stars, a cosmic dance of two souls bound together by forces older than time.
But with every shared secret, with every stolen kiss, Elara felt herself slipping further away from the world she knew. The line between reality and nightmare blurred. She saw shadows moving in the periphery of her vision, heard whispers in the wind that spoke her name in a tongue she didn’t understand.
One night, Silas took her hand and led her down to the beach. The moon was full, casting an eerie glow upon the sand. The tide was out, revealing a stretch of beach that Elara had never seen before. In the center, a circle of stones stood like ancient sentinels, their surfaces covered in the same strange glyphs she had seen in the waves.
Silas’s eyes burned with an unholy light. He told her that tonight, their union would be complete. Tonight, they would become one with the sea, one with the Old Ones. He reached out, his touch no longer cold, but burning like a brand.
Elara looked into his eyes, and in their depths, she saw not love, but the vast, uncaring emptiness of the cosmos. She saw the truth, a truth that chilled her to the very core. Silas wasn’t merely touched by the sea; he was the sea, a conduit for something ancient and malevolent. And the love he offered was not love at all, but a gateway to oblivion.
With a scream that was swallowed by the roar of the waves, Elara recoiled. She turned and fled, back towards the flickering lights of Dunwich, back towards the world she had almost left behind. She never looked back.
She never saw Silas again. But in her dreams, she still hears his voice, a low, seductive rumble that whispers her name from the depths of the sea, promising a love that transcends death and sanity, a love as vast and terrifying as the ocean itself. And sometimes, when the moon is full, she sees the swirling glyphs in the waves, a chilling reminder of the night she almost became one with the abyss.
I think it’s safe to say that, as fiction, it’s pretty bad. There’s a lot of purple prose and a lot of telling, not showing. There’s zero dialogue. It’s pretty, but it’s also factually inaccurate — Dunwich, the fictional town in some of Lovecraft’s stories, is inland, not coastal. It’s supposed to be a remote, rural town, nowhere near the Atlantic. Gemini took a name and decided to relocate it on the coast to tell the story of a fisherman. The “romance” is forced and without motivation (I read about a guy in a journal and then I decided to find him and weirdly fall in love with him?) and there’s neither a real sense of eldritch nor horror.
Possibly more interestingly to me is the fact that the last three (including this one) Lovecraftian stories I’ve prompted AI to write (across three different AIs at that — ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Gemini) have all had an ocean theme. And I don’t know that that’s a particularly standout component of Lovecraft’s works. I get it, of course, the ocean is vast an unknowable and a great subject for cosmic horror (what lurks deep beneath the waves?), but I just don’t think that was what Lovecraft wrote about. I haven’t read all his stuff, but what I have read was definitely not along the coast.
Let’s see how Gemini scored on the readability calculator:
( ARLCalc )
INFO.
AVERAGE READING LEVEL CONSENSUS
The average public reading level in the U.S. is 8th grade. Based on 8 formula(s), your text scored the following:
Score: 8.15 [ = grade level ] Read more
U.S. Grade Level: 8th Grade
Reading Level: Average – Slightly Difficult
Age Range: 13-14
AUTOMATED READABILITY INDEX
Score: 9.22 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Slightly Difficult
Grade Level: 9th Grade
Age Range: 14-15
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
ARI = (4.71 * ( 3820 characters / 810 words)) + (0.5 * (810 words / 48 sentences)) – 21.43
Final result: 9.22
==============================================
FLESCH READING EASE
Score: 72.00 [ = reading scale ] INFO.
Reading Difficulty: Fairly Easy
Grade Level: 7th Grade
Age Range: 12-13 years old
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
206.835 – (1.015 * (810 words / 48 sentences)) – (84.6 * 1128 syllables / 810 words)
Final result: 72.00
GUNNING FOG INDEX
Score: 8.10 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Average – Slightly Difficult
Grade Level: 8th Grade
Age Range: 13-14
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
FOG = (0.4 * (810 words / (48 sentences + 22 compound sentences)) + 100 * (70 FOG hard words / 810 words))
Final result: 8.10
FLESCH-KINCAID GRADE LEVEL
Score: 7.42 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Average
Grade Level: 7th Grade
Age Range: 12-13
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
SCORE = (0.39 * (810 words / 48 sentences)) + (11.8 * (1128 syllables / 810 words)) – 15.59
Final result: 7.42
COLEMAN-LIAU READABILITY INDEX
Score: 9.11 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Slightly Difficult
Grade Level: 9th Grade
Age Range: 14-15
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
SCORE = (0.0588 * (3673 letters / 810 words) * 100) – (0.296 * (48 sentences / 810 words) * 100) – 15.8
Final result: 9.11
==============================================
THE SMOG INDEX
Score: 7.28 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Average
Grade Level: 7th Grade
Age Range: 12-13
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
SCORE = 1.043 * Sqrt((73 hard words * (30 / 48 sentences)) + 3.1291)
Final result: 7.28
ORIGINAL LINSEAR WRITE FORMULA
Score: 81.00 [ = reading scale ] INFO.
Reading Difficulty: Above Average
Grade Level: 8th Grade
Age Range: 13-14 years old
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
Original Version Score = ((592 one-syllable words – 82 ignored words) * 1) + (3 * (48 sentences + 1 compound sentences)) / (810 total words / 100))
Final result: 80.74 = 81
==============================================
LINSEAR WRITE GRADE LEVEL FORMULA
Score: 7.95 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Average – Slightly Difficult
Grade Level: 8th Grade
Age Range: 13-14
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
Initial Score = (((740 easy words – 82 ignored words) * 1) + (73 hard words * 3)) / (48 sentences + 1 compound sentences)
Adjusted Score = (17.90 (initial score) – 2) / 2
Final result: 7.95
==============================================
FORCAST READABILITY FORMULA
Score: 9.04 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Slightly Difficult
Grade Level: 9th Grade
Age Range: 14-15
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
SCORE = 20 – ((592 1-syllable words * 150) / (810 words * 10))
Final result: 9.04
Results calculated on 3/21/2025 at 8:08:44 AM by ReadabilityFormulas.com
That’s about the same as DeepSeek and worse than ChatGPT. I don’t know that a lower reading score is bad, per se, but it’s worth revisiting again that Lovecraft himself is difficult to read (according to the same test), and scored a Grade Level 14.
At this point, I feel like I should make a scorecard to compare the different models and when the tests were done…🤔
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