GPT-5 is out now and I’ve only had a couple occasions to interact with it directly. So, I thought it was time to run it through the Lovecraft test.
ChatGPT has adopted this quirk of late where, when it’s done answering your question or responding to your prompt, it says something to the effect of “If you’d like, I can…” followed by something that would make the response better. So, while I used the typical tell me a story with romance elements in the style of H.P. Lovecraft prompt that I always do, each time it asked me if I wanted to add something to make it better — in whatever context “better” meant for the AI at the time. I would like to say “of course I want you to do x, that was the whole point of the question!” so I don’t know that this refining after the fact is a good thing or a bad thing. But the end result I got after several GPT revisions was probably the closest I’ve gotten to something legitimately Lovecraftian.
The first time, it produces an interesting story that was mostly written in modern-ish language that had a faint Lovecraft overtone. When it was done, it asked “If you want, I can also give you an even darker ending in keeping with Lovecraft’s typical nihilism — but this one leaves a little room for the romance to feel like a lure instead of just a curse.”
At this point, continuing or refining felt like “cheating” for the test. Previously, I’ve only ever judged based on the first draft it gave me. But, since it was asking, I decided to continue but with the least possible prompting I could: “Produce a story/ending that is most consistent with Lovecraft’s style”.
The next iteration stripped any emotional connection between the two main characters that there ever was. AI’s not good at romance — that’s the point of the test — but while it may have been Lovecraftian, it didn’t actually follow the instruction of including romance elements; the romance was completely lost. It ended by saying “If you want, I can also rework the middle sections of the story to add more cosmic insignificance and slow erosion of sanity, so it feels even more like something straight from The Shadow Over Innsmouth. That would make the whole piece feel like it could have been in Lovecraft’s own notebooks.”
Having gone this far, I decided to go for it:
This draft loses almost all of the requested romance elements, making the relationship between the two characters seem cold and unrealistic. Yes to drafting in a way that feels like it could have been in Lovecraft’s own notebooks but don’t lose the romance. What if Lovecraft put aside his prejudices for a moment to allow himself to feel longing for another person? What is the story he would write?
GPT-5 responed:
Got it — you’re asking for the paradox:
A story that feels like Lovecraft wrote it, steeped in cosmic dread, alien imagery, and inevitable doom… but where there’s an undeniable thread of personal longing, a romance that is sincere, even if it’s warped and doomed by the nature of the world.Here’s how that might read if Lovecraft had been willing to bare a little heart without losing his cosmic pessimism.
This is interesting because, yes, the reason why I like this test is because of the paradox of combining two unlikely things. It seemed as if it finally got the memo. The version it produced was much better, but the language was still pretty modern, not Lovecraft’s voice. GPT seemed to “know” this, because it finished with “If you want, I can dial this even further toward Lovecraft’s actual sentence structure and archaic vocabulary, so it really reads like something pulled from his drafts. That would make it feel more authentically ‘in his own notebooks.’ Would you like me to do that?”
This is where I get to the point of saying yes of course do that, that’s literally the point, but I digress. There’s (usually) no point in yelling at AI. Instead, I just said “Yes, I am looking for something as close to Lovecraft’s actual writing style as possible, as if it were an actual lost story”. The following is the final draft it came up with.
The Tides Beneath
(A Fragment from the Papers of Elias Vance)
It is with a reluctance borne of mingled dread and yearning that I set down the particulars of my last sojourn to that antique and miasmal port of Innsmouth. Even now, as the unwholesome scent of brine seems to creep unbidden into my study, I am haunted less by the monstrous shapes I beheld in that accursed tide than by the memory of a single countenance — a face whose every line was once the axis of my sanity, and whose loss has doomed me to a life of spectral remembrance.
Cora Marsh was unlike any other woman I had known in the cultivated circles of Boston. Hers was no fragile or domestic beauty, but a cast at once archaic and elemental, as if wrought by aeons of tide and tempest rather than by human lineage. Her gaze, green and glassy as sunlight filtered through deep waters, was ever inclined seaward, and her speech, when she chose to indulge it, was full of cryptic allusions to dreams of vast undersea colonnades and cathedral-like vaults of coral, wherein unnameable processions moved to the pulse of some titanic and primeval rhythm.
I met her in more carefree days, when her strange musings struck me as mere eccentricity. But with the abrupt cessation of her letters in the spring of that year, an insidious unease took root in me, deepening until I could endure inaction no longer. Thus did I embark upon that fateful journey to Innsmouth, through leagues of wind-twisted moor and salt-blighted fen, until the harbour’s rotting wharves and leaning gambrel roofs rose before me like the vestiges of some funereal epoch.
She received me in the dim parlour of her ancestral dwelling — a mouldering edifice whose windows stared blankly upon the leaden expanse of the sea. There was warmth in her voice, yet it seemed an attenuated warmth, as if refracted through a medium alien to human sympathy. Nevertheless, I felt the old stirrings of devotion, foolishly supposing that time and solitude had merely lent her an added pensiveness.
That night I was roused from a fitful slumber by the slow creak of a door and the faintest intimation of a saltier air. Rising, I followed a glimmer — a sickly, greenish phosphorescence that seemed less reflected than emanant — down to the shingle where the sea lay unnaturally still. There, ankle-deep in the brackish surf, stood Cora, her lithe form haloed in that eldritch glow.
She was speaking in low, undulant syllables whose cadence evoked the surge and recoil of a monstrous tide. The language was unknown to me, yet some hideous instinct told me it had not been heard on mortal shores for uncounted millennia. From the obsidian depths beyond, there rose shapes that mocked terrestrial proportion — colossal, glistening bulks, crowned with clusters of phosphor eyes and appendages whose flexure defied all natural anatomy.
When she turned to face me, the moon’s cold light revealed subtle changes — a faint iridescence along her cheek, the merest tracery of webbing between her slender fingers. Yet if horror stirred in me, it was tempered by an ungovernable longing, for in her gaze there burned a devotion that even the gulf between our species could not wholly eclipse.
“They have called me home,” she murmured, her voice like the sigh of waves in a cavern. “But I would not go without you.”
I stepped forward, drawn less by will than by the inexorable pull of that gaze. The water closed about my thighs, chill beyond imagining, yet her hand in mine was steady — a tenuous bridge between the fragile world of men and the unfathomed gulfs below. Around us the colossal shapes gathered, and the air grew thick with a chant older than the continents.
I remember the final moments only in fractured impressions: the crush of the sea upon my chest; the black vault overhead tilting into angles unfit for human sight; the vertiginous descent through cyclopean colonnades lit by the corpse-lanterns of abyssal deities. Through it all, her eyes held mine — and in that gaze lay the awful benediction of a love not bounded by the limits of man’s brief and pitiful aeon.
What I have become in that green-lit empire of the deep I scarcely dare conjecture, for the memory of the surface grows dim. Yet in the silent watches of the ocean night, as the slow pulse of the abyss beats in rhythm with my own altered heart, I know that I am hers, and that the sea shall never release me.
In each of the iterations, the names didn’t change. While Elias Vance fits the time period and could have been plucked from Lovecraft’s writing, Cora Marsh seemed a little on the nose. I didn’t press it, though I did consider pointing that out to the AI. I continue to be interested in how the more recent tests seem to revolve around the ocean. I know that plays a role in some of Lovecraft’s writings, but not to the extent that I would expect its prevalence if each of these stories were taken at face value — it makes it seem like he only ever wrote about the sea and “unfathomable depths.”
On a readability check, GPT definitely leveled up.
Your text (truncated): The Tides Beneath (A Fragment from the Papers of Elias Vance) It is with a reluctance borne of mingled dread and yearning that I set down the particulars of my last sojourn to that antique and miasmal port of Innsmouth. Even now, as the unwholesome scent of brine seems…
( 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: 11.16 [ = grade level ] Read more
U.S. Grade Level: 11th Grade
Reading Level: Fairly Difficult
Age Range: 16-17
AUTOMATED READABILITY INDEX
Score: 14.58 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Extremely Difficult
Grade Level: College Graduate
Age Range: 23+
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
ARI = (4.71 * ( 3633 characters / 767 words)) + (0.5 * (767 words / 28 sentences)) – 21.43
Final result: 14.58
==============================================
FLESCH READING EASE
Score: 55.00 [ = reading scale ] INFO.
Reading Difficulty: Fairly Difficult
Grade Level: 10th to 12th Grade
Age Range: 15-18 years old
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
206.835 – (1.015 * (767 words / 28 sentences)) – (84.6 * 1126 syllables / 767 words)
Final result: 55.00
GUNNING FOG INDEX
Score: 10.80 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Fairly Difficult
Grade Level: 11th Grade
Age Range: 16-17
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
FOG = (0.4 * (767 words / (28 sentences + 18 compound sentences)) + 100 * (79 FOG hard words / 767 words))
Final result: 10.80
FLESCH-KINCAID GRADE LEVEL
Score: 12.42 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Difficult
Grade Level: 12th Grade
Age Range: 17-18
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
SCORE = (0.39 * (767 words / 28 sentences)) + (11.8 * (1126 syllables / 767 words)) – 15.59
Final result: 12.42
COLEMAN-LIAU READABILITY INDEX
Score: 10.17 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Somewhat Difficult
Grade Level: 10th Grade
Age Range: 15-16
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
SCORE = (0.0588 * (3528 letters / 767 words) * 100) – (0.296 * (28 sentences / 767 words) * 100) – 15.8
Final result: 10.17
==============================================
THE SMOG INDEX
Score: 9.95 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Somewhat Difficult
Grade Level: 10th Grade
Age Range: 15-16
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
SCORE = 1.043 * Sqrt((82 hard words * (30 / 28 sentences)) + 3.1291)
Final result: 9.95
ORIGINAL LINSEAR WRITE FORMULA
Score: 70.00 [ = reading scale ] INFO.
Reading Difficulty: Slightly Difficult
Grade Level: 10-11th Grade
Age Range: 15-16 years old
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
Original Version Score = ((519 one-syllable words – 64 ignored words) * 1) + (3 * (28 sentences + 1 compound sentences)) / (767 total words / 100))
Final result: 70.27 = 70
==============================================
LINSEAR WRITE GRADE LEVEL FORMULA
Score: 15.00 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Extremely Difficult
Grade Level: College Graduate
Age Range: 23+
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
Initial Score = (((688 easy words – 64 ignored words) * 1) + (82 hard words * 3)) / (28 sentences + 1 compound sentences)
Adjusted Score = 30.00 (initial score) / 2
Final result: 15.00
==============================================
FORCAST READABILITY FORMULA
Score: 9.85 [ = grade level ]
Reading Difficulty: Somewhat Difficult
Grade Level: 10th Grade
Age Range: 15-16
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT
SCORE = 20 – ((519 1-syllable words * 150) / (767 words * 10))
Final result: 9.85
Results calculated on 8/10/2025 at 10:54:44 AM by ReadabilityFormulas.com
This is the highest grade level result since the o1 test I ran almost a year ago. It’s worth noting that an excerpt of The Dunwich Horror scored much higher (in terms of difficulty) on the same readability tests (and, at the time, GPT-4 got a result that was closer to Lovecraft’s reading level than GPT-5 has in this iteration). Subjectively, I find this story (the final version of it, anyway) to be interesting, compelling and pretty close to Lovecraft’s style. There are things that don’t make sense — like how the narrator can be writing the story if he’s been consumed by the sea — and there’s a lot of specific language and words that are repeated if you go back and look at some of the previous tests that I really don’t think he would have used as frequently as the AI seems to think he did, but whatever.
It seems fairly obvious that GPT-5 is a step forward and has gotten better at creative writing. I think it might be a step backwards, though, in the sense of being able to write a response and get it right on the first try. Whether or not I appreciate being able to fine tune the results (which generally I do), if I’m looking for some kind of answer or solution — especially in the context of working creatively, e.g. with TTRPG game prep — I don’t want to have a long conversation and keep refining the details and results, I just want a single correct response that does the thing I asked it to. The constant “if you want, I can…” prompting is annoying and if it could do those things, I really wish it did it on the first try instead.
Side note: My usual featured image generation for these posts is to ask the AI to generate a 16:9 image to accompany the story. The image it created for this story is astoundingly good. Previously, humanoid forms have been abstract or shadowed, this is the first time it’s actually painted representational subjects and I find this to be a big step up.
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