10 passages, each split into two halves that run on from each
other. One half is real prose by a named author, published between
1660 and 1922. The other was written by an AI told to continue in the
same voice. Pick the machine.
10 rounds · about four minutes · no sign-up, no email
Round 1 of 10
0 correct
A Victorian clerk's diaryWarm-up
The real diarist consents, admits he has been talked over, and then plants radishes and goes to bed at nine. He extracts no lesson at all. The machine half cannot resist one: a tricolon of virtues, then a resolve to do better next time. The whole joke of this book is that Pooter never learns anything.
A seventeenth-century London diaryWarm-up
Pepys is very angry with Will, gives him a great check for it, and goes to bed. The anger simply stops. The machine half turns the same household material into a maxim about how small matters grow into greater ones, then closes on a resolution to be more careful. Pepys does moralise on occasion. He does not tie a bow on it.
A comic novel about a boating holidayWarm-up
The genuine half measures the smell against a charwoman who cannot detect it, and lets her line, “What smell?”, do all the work. The machine half explains the situation instead of staging it, then reaches for a general observation about how households unite against an object. Jerome never tells you what is curious about human nature. He shows you a woman sniffing a cheese and calling it melon.
A memoir of piloting the MississippiTrickier
The second half is nothing but numbers, and Twain lets the arithmetic land the joke without any help. The first half explains in advance what those numbers are going to mean, hands you a portable aphorism about the pilot's youth and age, and then announces that the figures tell the story plainly enough. Setting up the punchline is the tell.
An eighteenth-century naturalist's lettersTrickier
White gets a promising story about swallows in the cliff rubble and then destroys it himself: he asked the man whether he saw them, and the answer was no. The finding is left broken, and that is the entire point of the paragraph. The machine half sweeps the same doubt into a balanced tricolon and lands on humility. Models are very good at sounding judicious and very reluctant to leave a fact dangling.
A Victorian clerk's diaryTrickier
Pooter's own paragraph ends inside the humiliation: he retires on a pretext and never admits he was ill. The machine half tidies the episode into a conclusion about American cigars, then widens out into a general observation about men who press their enthusiasms on their friends. Comic diarists stay inside the embarrassment. Imitations climb out of it and comment.
A comic story about a gentleman and his valetTrickier
Both halves sound like Wodehouse. The difference is what they do with her. The machine half characterises Lady Malvern in general terms across three balanced sentences and files her in the front rank of aunts. The real half throws one absurd image at her, an east wind, and then abandons her completely to talk about eggs. Wodehouse digresses. The imitation summarises.
A comic novel about a boating holidayHard
This one is hard, because the machine half is funny and the rhythm is right. The tell is that it converts the scene into a maxim: there is no argument so persuasive as a smell. Jerome's half never steps back to tell you what it means. It just keeps watching people open the door, stagger back, and pay the difference to go first. The imitation writes the moral. The original keeps filming.
A memoir of piloting the MississippiHard
The hardest of the ten, because the first half has real detail and something close to the right swagger. Watch the order of operations. It states the conclusion, that nothing on the lower river is leisurely and even fuelling is contrived so the boat need not stop. Then Twain demonstrates it by making you wipe your glasses, put them on, and find the wood already gone. Models announce first and illustrate second, or announce and never illustrate at all.
A comic story about a gentleman and his valetHard
The second half proves how rattled he is with one object: he nearly put on a white tie with a dinner-jacket. The first half describes the feeling instead, in a neat general formula about first-class disasters taking time to sink in. Wodehouse measures an emotion by what it makes a man do. The imitation tells you what the emotion was like.
Your result
0/10
This was the easy version
Here you knew one half was synthetic, you had two options, and
somebody told you the answer. When an answer engine reads your
category, none of that is true. It reads everything, decides which
writing to trust, and repeats it to the person asking.
Voxoria tracks how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI
Overviews answer questions about your brand and your competitors,
then shows you what to fix so the answer comes out in your favour.
Every round pairs a paragraph of genuine published prose with a
paragraph an AI wrote to continue it. The human halves come from Pepys,
Gilbert White, Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome, the Grossmiths and P. G.
Wodehouse, published between 1660 and 1922 and long out of copyright.
That date range is the point: it is what makes them verifiably human,
because every one of them predates the machine by a century or more.
Which half is synthetic changes from round to round, so you cannot win
by always picking the second one.
Because the machine is imitating a period voice, the giveaways you
already know are gone. No corporate hedging, no “in today's fast-paced
world”. What is left is structural. The imitation reaches for a maxim
where the original stays with the object, it balances its clauses more
evenly than a person does, and it lands neatly instead of trailing off.
Later rounds are harder on purpose.
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