Even LLMs from years ago could accurately mimic the style of any sufficiently famous author.

LLMs from years ago weren't aligned to death like these days. It's hard to get rid of "AI smell" than years ago.

Yeah and it's degraded significantly since then. Older llms were still mostly language focused and had a lot of latent knowledge about things like writing styles. Now it's crowded out in favor of agenetic work, programming etc.

No, the latent knowledge is larger than ever, as verified by many benchmarks (and instances like people being shocked by truesight of obscure forum posters). This is 100% a chatbot personality/alignment/post-training thing.

> truesight of obscure forum posters

What does this mean?

I’m surprised no one has distilled a 4o model yet that’s really good at prose. No money from enterprise users I suppose.

At best it can use some of the same vocabulary. Often not even then.