{"slug": "show-hn-can-you-tell-wodehouse-from-a-model-imitating-wodehouse", "title": "Show HN: Can you tell Wodehouse from a model imitating Wodehouse?", "summary": "A new interactive quiz challenges readers to distinguish between prose by authors such as P.G. Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, and Mark Twain, published between 1660 and 1922, and continuations written by an AI model imitating their style. The quiz, which takes about four minutes and requires no sign-up, presents 10 passages split into halves, with one half real and the other machine-written, and asks players to identify the machine. The quiz's creator highlights that AI imitations often add moral conclusions or tidy resolutions, whereas the original authors leave details unresolved or let absurdity stand alone.", "body_md": "10 passages, each split into two halves that run on from each\nother. One half is real prose by a named author, published between\n1660 and 1922. The other was written by an AI told to continue in the\nsame voice. Pick the machine.\n\n10 rounds · about four minutes · no sign-up, no email\n\nRound 1 of 10\n\n0 correct\n\nA Victorian clerk's diaryWarm-up\n\nThe 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.\n\nA seventeenth-century London diaryWarm-up\n\nPepys 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.\n\nA comic novel about a boating holidayWarm-up\n\nThe 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.\n\nA memoir of piloting the MississippiTrickier\n\nThe 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.\n\nAn eighteenth-century naturalist's lettersTrickier\n\nWhite 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.\n\nA Victorian clerk's diaryTrickier\n\nPooter'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.\n\nA comic story about a gentleman and his valetTrickier\n\nBoth 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.\n\nA comic novel about a boating holidayHard\n\nThis 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.\n\nA memoir of piloting the MississippiHard\n\nThe 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.\n\nA comic story about a gentleman and his valetHard\n\nThe 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.\n\nYour result\n\n0/10\n\nThis was the easy version\n\nHere you knew one half was synthetic, you had two options, and\nsomebody told you the answer. When an answer engine reads your\ncategory, none of that is true. It reads everything, decides which\nwriting to trust, and repeats it to the person asking.\n\nVoxoria tracks how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI\nOverviews answer questions about your brand and your competitors,\nthen shows you what to fix so the answer comes out in your favour.\n\nEvery round pairs a paragraph of genuine published prose with a\nparagraph an AI wrote to continue it. The human halves come from Pepys,\nGilbert White, Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome, the Grossmiths and P. G.\nWodehouse, published between 1660 and 1922 and long out of copyright.\nThat date range is the point: it is what makes them verifiably human,\nbecause every one of them predates the machine by a century or more.\nWhich half is synthetic changes from round to round, so you cannot win\nby always picking the second one.\n\nBecause the machine is imitating a period voice, the giveaways you\nalready know are gone. No corporate hedging, no “in today's fast-paced\nworld”. What is left is structural. The imitation reaches for a maxim\nwhere the original stays with the object, it balances its clauses more\nevenly than a person does, and it lands neatly instead of trailing off.\nLater rounds are harder on purpose.\n\nWe use analytics cookies to understand how the site is used. See our Privacy Policy.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-can-you-tell-wodehouse-from-a-model-imitating-wodehouse", "canonical_source": "https://voxoria.ai/ai-or-not-text/", "published_at": "2026-08-21 09:00:07+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-21 09:14:02.909275+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "large-language-models", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["P.G. Wodehouse", "Jerome K. Jerome", "Mark Twain", "Samuel Pepys", "George Grossmith", "Gilbert White"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-can-you-tell-wodehouse-from-a-model-imitating-wodehouse", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-can-you-tell-wodehouse-from-a-model-imitating-wodehouse.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-can-you-tell-wodehouse-from-a-model-imitating-wodehouse.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-can-you-tell-wodehouse-from-a-model-imitating-wodehouse.jsonld"}}