Fulcrum faces an identity crisis, even as it works on creating one by enabling anyone to imitate another person's writing style. The AI startup, founded in 2025 and previously operating at fulcrumresearch.ai, now uses fulcrum.inc and could easily be confused with one of the handful of other companies named Fulcrum or some variation of that. There's Fulcrum (withfulcrum.com), Fulcrum (fulcrumapp.com), Fulcrum AI (fulcrumai.us), Fulcrum Digital (fulcrumdigital.com), Fulcrum Labs (fulcrumlabs.ai), Fulcrum (fulcrumpro.com), Fulcrum Insurance Technology (fulcruminsure.app), and perhaps more.

This Fulcrum is offering a large language model called Echo, which allows you to generate text in the style of a well-known author. Fulcrum appears to have no issue with corporate echoes. It now falls to writers to decide whether they have an issue with non-corporeal imitation. "Echo can do any writing task, from literary fiction to casual chatting, in whatever style you choose," the company says, and then launches into an exploration of how the technology works without addressing whether imitating a person's writing style poses any problems.

Suggestions in the Echo Playground, for generating sample text, include Paul Christiano, Emily Dickinson, and Donald Trump. So, the full gamut of literary achievement: from AI safety expert to acclaimed 19th-century poet to the wordsmith who brought us "covfefe." But Echo will echo even the style of not-so-famous scribes, such as this reporter. So I fed the model a recent op-ed to assess its copying capabilities.

The result was mixed, but better than the AI-crafted pitches that have been hitting my inbox for the past few months. I asked the model, "What do you think about the possibility that AI is conscious?" Here's part of the response, notionally written in my writing style. I suspect the debate about whether AI is conscious is less consequential than the debate about whether AI is profitable.

Consciousness is a word that invites philosophical speculation and TED Talk invitations. Profitability is a word that invites shareholder lawsuits if you get it wrong. If you ask Meta's latest model whether it's conscious, it will probably say something reassuringly vague, trained as it is on the corpus of human equivocation. If you ask Mark Zuckerberg whether Meta's AI is conscious, he will probably say something about how we need to focus on the future being for everyone, because that's a question that doesn't require him to discuss the ad targeting business.

The evidence for AI consciousness at the moment is about as strong as the evidence for Zuck's credibility as a futurist. Which is to say, it exists mainly in press releases and earnings calls. What's clear is that software can simulate aspects of human conversation well enough to unsettle people, and that unsettled people are a valuable audience. If you can convince users that your chatbot understands them – or might, someday – you can sell them subscriptions, or better, harvest their attention for advertisers.

The style is familiar but makes a lot of choices I wouldn't have made. I wouldn't begin with "I suspect…" – commit or go home. The consciousness/profitability parallel construction is clumsy. "TED Talk invitations" bets on alliteration at the expense of coherence – "discourse" or "chatter" would work better than "invitations." I wouldn't have written "corpus of human equivocation" – a nice turn of phrase, but an unnecessary shot at training data when the point is the model's response rather than the provenance of that response.

Though off-topic, Echo did a passable job of reproducing my op-ed's skepticism of Meta and its CEO. The paragraph that begins "The evidence for AI consciousness at the moment…" is succinct and sounds good. It just doesn't make much sense because there's nothing in the text that addresses Zuckerberg's predictions about the future or whether they're credible.

And that's not really relevant to the prompt about AI and consciousness – a subject about which I'd be far more dismissive if opining. As AI research, Echo is an improvement on the text emitted by many AI models. But whether the beneficial uses of this technology outweigh the harms is less clear. Generative AI models that imitate artists' visual styles remain controversial and are the subject of ongoing litigation. And voice imitation has also raised questions about publicity rights and the risk of deception.

Such concerns have prompted US lawmakers to propose the NO FAKES Act, which would create federal protections against certain unauthorized AI-generated replicas of a person's voice or visual likeness. If writers generally have no copyright in their writing style itself, and limited practical means to stop unwanted automated imitation of it when their published work is publicly accessible, then the surest defense against Echo may be silence.®