A research team led by Steven Skiena, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, announced on Apr. 7 that they successfully used artificial intelligence to rewrite The Great Gatsby without using the letter ‘e.’ The project was presented at the IJCNLP-AACL conference.
The work explores how large language models handle strong constraints while preserving nuance and style. This is important because it tests whether artificial intelligence can maintain meaning and readability when forced to avoid one of the most common letters in English.
Skiena said, “The letter ‘e’ makes up roughly 12 percent of ordinary English text, and the text we produced serves as a testament of the malleability of the English language.” He and his students approached this task as a translation challenge—not from one language to another, but from standard English into an e-less form.
The process involved training a language model to swap words and restructure sentences while keeping Fitzgerald’s narrative intact. According to Skiena, this turns what might seem like a simple gimmick into a rigorous test for modern AI models. The goal was for these systems to obey strict rules without losing coherence or sense.
Readers interested in more details about this project can find the full story by Ankita Nagpal on the AI Innovation Institute website.
This experiment highlights new possibilities for creative writing with artificial intelligence under severe linguistic restrictions.
