Member-only story
Artificial Intelligence News
I Ran Shakespeare Through an AI Checker
The results were a comedy of errors
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece explaining why I run my articles through AI checkers before publishing them. Partly out of curiosity, partly out of fun, to see if my writing has started resembling something a machine might write.
On average, my articles come back with an AI score somewhere between 10% and 20%. It’s not because I use AI, but because parts of my writing are statistically similar to the sort of text language models often produce.
That doesn’t necessarily mean my writing is bad. It just means it’s smooth, grammatically consistent, and, in places, a little predictable. Exactly the sort of writing I was taught at school: clear, plain English, without too many surprises.
So what about Shakespeare? A writer famous for inventing words, bending the English language to his will, and producing some of the most original writing ever published. Surely even the harshest AI detector would return 0%.
You would think so, wouldn’t you?
So I checked.
I fed Hamlet, The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream through three different AI detectors: Turnitin, ZeroGPT and Originality.ai.