Moby-Dick

Herman Melville · 1851 · Adventure

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

Why the number is interesting

First-person, immediate voice. Melville's rambling energy reads as human even to statistical models.

What VEYL saw

12% puts Moby-Dick clearly in "human writing" territory, though not at 0. What pulls the score down: the idiosyncratic vocabulary ("spleen," "coffin warehouses"), the personal aside ("It is a way I have of driving off the spleen"), the semicolon-driven rhythmic asides, and the strong first-person character voice. What keeps it at 12 rather than 0: some of Melville's sentences have a formal rhythmic quality — the parallel "whenever… whenever… whenever" construction, in particular, has a rhetorical regularity that VEYL's statistical classifier reads as faintly AI-adjacent. Nothing here suggests actual AI authorship. The verdict is: clearly a human writer with a distinctive voice, with a small statistical shadow from careful sentence construction.

The novel's opening

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

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet.

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