A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens · 1859 · Historical

AI probability VEYL scanned the opening passage below.

Why the number is interesting

Dickens' doubled parallelism sounds rhetorical enough to fool anyone — but VEYL sees a distinctly human hand at work.

What VEYL saw in the passage

This is the passage most likely to trick an AI detector — the "it was X, it was Y" doubled structure is exactly the kind of pattern a language model likes. But VEYL reads the full feature stack, not just sentence patterns. The archaic vocabulary ("epoch," "incredulity"), the deliberate irony in the last two clauses ("going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way"), and the accelerating rhythm that sharpens rather than dilutes each pair — these all signal a specific author choosing every word. AI-generated parallelism tends to be more mechanical, uniformly weighted. Dickens's version has escalation, sarcasm, and a punch line. Zero percent.

The passage VEYL scanned

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

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