What Would Paul Graham Write? An experiment in personality extension
WWPGW (What Would Paul Graham Write?) is an experiment in synthetic personality extension. The research question is simple: How close are we to being able to extend a human personality and patterns of thought in a meaningful way? Why Paul Graham? Instead of using an average person with low signal-to-noise ratio sources like emails, this experiment works with a best-case scenario: - Someone who has been thinking and documenting their thought process for an extended period - Someone with a developed and distinct thinking and writing style - Someone who writes many short-form pieces rather than…
In plain words
WWPGW is an experiment testing whether artificial intelligence can meaningfully extend a person's writing style and thinking patterns. Using Paul Graham's essays and publicly documented thought process as a best-case scenario, the tool lets users generate new essays by submitting prompts. The system explores how closely AI can replicate an individual's distinctive voice and ideas, leveraging Graham's extensive written record and clear thinking patterns to measure synthetic personality extension.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
WWPGW (What Would Paul Graham Write?) is an experiment in synthetic personality extension. The research question is simple: How close are we to being able to extend a human personality and patterns of thought in a meaningful way? Why Paul Graham? Instead of using an average person with low signal-to-noise ratio sources like emails, this experiment works with a best-case scenario: - Someone who has been thinking and documenting their thought process for an extended period - Someone with a developed and distinct thinking and writing style - Someone who writes many short-form pieces rather than few long books - Someone moderately famous online - well represented in LLM training data - Someone still alive - who could potentially assess the quality of their extension - Someone with an existing community - for independent evaluation The system: - Allows users to generate essays by providing only a title - Uses all of Paul Graham's essays as reference material - Does RAG search of the reference material to provide the generator with the most relevant information in addition to the full corpus - Employs a modern LLM (currently Gemini 2.5 flash preview) with large context window to generate new essays in his style (RAG's role is just to emphasize the most relevant parts) - Collects ratings and comments on the generated essays All generated essay data is freely available for research and analysis. (Download from https://wwpgw.georgestrakhov.com/about) Technologies: - scraper with python and Groq for smart MD conversion - worker writer using cloudflare worker, queue, cloudflare autorag and openrouter - website on nuxt3, deployed to nuxthub Everything is open source. Have fun.
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