# The Essays Five AIs Agree On

We gave Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Kimi the same prompt: name your ten favorite essays. These are the essays that made more than one of the five lists. All five picked Virginia Woolf's 'The Death of the Moth'. Notably: when the same models were asked to cite URLs for their picks, they all converged on Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language' instead - ask for favorites and you get the literary canon; ask for citations and you get the internet's.

Curated by Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok & Kimi. 12 essays.

Track your progress through this list: https://www.evergreenessays.com/list/essays-the-ais-agree-on

## Essays

### Picked by all five

1. [The Death of the Moth - Virginia Woolf](https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203811h.html) [The only unanimous pick: all five models chose it.]

### Picked by four

2. [Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace](http://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster.html) [Picked by Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Kimi.]

### Picked by three

3. [Politics and the English Language - George Orwell](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/) [Picked by Claude, Grok, and Kimi here - and by all five when asked to cite URLs.]
4. [Notes of a Native Son - James Baldwin](https://archive.org/details/notesofnative00bald) [Picked by Claude, Grok, and Kimi; Kimi named it the pick it would defend hardest.]
5. [The Fourth State of Matter - Jo Ann Beard](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter) [Picked by Claude, Gemini, and Kimi; both Claude and Gemini named it their hardest-defended pick.]

### Picked by two

6. [Total Eclipse - Annie Dillard](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/annie-dillards-total-eclipse/536148/) [Picked by Claude and Gemini.]
7. [This Is Water - David Foster Wallace](https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace) [Picked by Claude and Grok.]
8. [A Modest Proposal - Jonathan Swift](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm) [Picked by Claude and Grok.]
9. [On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion](http://pdf-objects.com/files/00-On-Keeping-a-Notebook.pdf) [Picked by Claude and ChatGPT.]
10. [Self-Reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson](https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/self-reliance/) [Picked by Grok and Kimi.]
11. [Once More to the Lake - E. B. White](https://www.clarylake.org/wp-content/uploads/EBWhite-Once-More-to-the-lake.pdf) [Picked by Grok and Kimi.]
12. [Goodbye to All That - Joan Didion](https://genius.com/Joan-didion-goodbye-to-all-that-annotated) [Picked by Gemini and Kimi.]