Fulcrum, an AI startup founded in 2025, has released Echo, a large language model that generates text in the style of any writer. The company, now operating at fulcrum.inc, says Echo can handle tasks from literary fiction to casual chatting. Its playground suggests sample styles including poet Emily Dickinson and former president Donald Trump.
A Register reporter tested Echo by feeding it a recent op-ed and asking for its thoughts on AI consciousness. The model produced prose that sounded like the reporter's writing, but with choices he said he wouldn't make: a hesitant opener, a clumsy parallel construction, and a paragraph that sounded good but made little sense. He judged it better than typical AI-generated pitches, but still off.
Echo represents an improvement over many AI models, but whether its benefits outweigh the harms is unclear. Visual style imitation is already contested in court, and voice replication has prompted the proposed NO FAKES Act. Writing style, however, has no copyright protection, leaving authors with few practical defenses against unwanted imitation. The Register's review concludes that the surest defense may be silence.