10 passages, each split into two halves that run on from each other. One half is real prose by a named author, published between 1660 and 1922. The other was written by an AI told to continue in the same voice. Pick the machine. 10 rounds · about four minutes · no sign-up, no email Round 1 of 10 0 correct A Victorian clerk's diaryWarm-up The 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. A seventeenth-century London diaryWarm-up Pepys 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. A comic novel about a boating holidayWarm-up The 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. A memoir of piloting the MississippiTrickier The 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. An eighteenth-century naturalist's lettersTrickier White gets a promising story about swallows in the cliff rubble and then destroys it himself: he asked the...