Fulcrum Echo promises AI text in the style of any writer, so I tested it

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.