The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 · Literary

29%

AI probability VEYL scanned the opening passage below.

Why the number is interesting

Highest-scoring book so far. Polished sentence rhythm reads as mid-range — a reminder that carefully edited prose can look AI-like.

What VEYL saw in the passage

29% is the highest score in this collection so far, and it surprised us. Nothing about Fitzgerald's opening suggests actual AI authorship — Nick Carraway's voice is unmistakably human, from the personal advice framing to the ironic reservation of "the victim of not a few veteran bores." But Fitzgerald was famously meticulous, revising Gatsby's sentences dozens of times each, and that carefully edited quality is exactly what VEYL's classifier reads as AI-adjacent. The sentence rhythms are unusually smooth. The vocabulary is polished. There are no dropped clauses, false starts, or conversational hesitations that mark hastier writing. The takeaway is important: "AI-like" doesn't always mean "AI-generated" — it often means "prose so carefully finished that it resembles the smoothness AI models optimize for." Fitzgerald wrote by hand, over years. But his final drafts scan closer to AI than Melville's.

The passage VEYL scanned

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

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