I'm currently rereading "Titus Groan", the first novel of the Gormenghast trilogy, and I thought it would interesting to test out Google's Gemini using the following query:
Can you describe the appearance of a fictitious person who appears suddenly and asks for directions. The description should be in the style of the characters that appear in the Gormenghast trilogy.
I was quite impressed with the response. Here it is:
A figure, seemingly extruded from the very fog that clung to the courtyard stones, materialized before me. Not quite a man, not quite a shadow, but a damp, rustling presence. His coat, a patchwork of what might have once been velvet and now resembled desiccated bat wings, draped to the cobbles, trailing a faint, earthy scent. His face, glimpsed beneath a hat woven from what looked like dried reeds and raven feathers, was a landscape of deep, shadowed hollows and jutting, bone-like prominences. One eye, a milky, opalescent orb, stared fixedly, while the other seemed to have retreated into a fold of skin, leaving only a twitching, purplish scar. His hands, gnarled and speckled with a strange, verdigris-like substance, clutched a crumpled, damp parchment. A voice, thin and reedy, like the wind whistling through a broken flute, rasped, "The... the path... to the... the Obsidian Stair? Which... which way?" His lips, cracked and blue, barely moved, as if the words were being forced through a sieve of bone.
I'd been prompted to do this after reading an article by a writer on technology who had been mightily impressed with AI's ability to write short stories.
