the inimitability of the tiger

14.04.2026

Alfonso and I, we had both been to visit a friend again in the hospital. I had rushed there after work while completing several urgent errands on the way. We had spent about an hour with him, cheering him up and asking him how things were over there. Afterwards, Alfonso had taken me to his home and cooked me up beef enchaladas with a salad and sour cream. Then we had watched Sting performing on the television set in the bygone era.

I had been telling Alfonso of the useless attempts of an Ai system to duplicate my written efforts. ‘Did you know,’ I asked him, ‘that Dickens used to call himself the inimitable. And, certainly, according to the experiments today, The Tiger himself is also inimitable.’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘Well, I asked this Ai system to replicate my style. I typed in my name and told it to do it. To create a new story based on the way that I write.’

‘What were the results?’ asked Alfonso with a mockery of gravity.

‘The story was absolutely atrocious. It was about a pigeon watching me while the state created a duplicate identity of me and informed me of it by post.’

‘Ill-written?’

‘Precisely. There was not the least touch of my style or the sound of my mind. Basically, this Ai system had concocted a mixture of Kafka and Poe’s Raven, because that is what it understood my style to be. Not only that, but there had been an attempt at a philosophical conversation. I say an attempt because there was certainly no depth or original thinking involved at all.’

‘And how did this make you feel, watching the Ai perform you so badly? Were you reassured of your idiosyncracy and capriciousness?’

‘It certainly let me know that I was not a mindless and meaningless computer, a hunk of metal and minerals. It certainly let me know that this style that has developed through genius and a lifetime of suffering and practice cannot be so easily acquired.’

‘Do you think a mortal could write like you do?’

‘Of course they could not. Genius, although it is imitated, is always in the last analysis inimitable. I am sure that plenty will try to become The Tiger. However, as in the movie, there is is only one.’