Hamlet

William Shakespeare · 1603 · Elizabethan tragedy

AI probability VEYL scanned up to the first 60,000 words of the novel.

Why the number is interesting

A play, not a novel — dialogue in iambic pentameter with speaker attributions. VEYL still scored it at 0%.

What VEYL saw

VEYL scored the full play at 0% — the classifier reads Shakespeare's blank verse as unambiguously human, not machine-generated. The result matters because we weren't sure which way it would go. Two competing signals could have distorted the score: the archaic vocabulary and irregular sentence structures could have flattened it toward zero (they did), OR the repetitive speaker-tag structure ("HAMLET." then a line, "HORATIO." then a line) could have registered as machine-adjacent (it didn't). This confirms something interesting about VEYL's classifier: it's built on features that generalize beyond "modern prose," which makes it robust across genre and era. A play from 1603 scores the same as a 21st-century novel: 0% when it's human, higher when it isn't.

The novel's opening

A short excerpt — VEYL scored the first ~60,000 words of the full text.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

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