# Do AI detectors flag famous texts? We tested 30 classics

Source: https://toolbenchmarks.com/famous-texts/  
Tested: 30 October 2026. Publisher: Tool Benchmarks. Data licence: CC BY 4.0.

> Yes, often. We ran 30 famous texts, from the Declaration of Independence to Moby-Dick, through seven free AI detectors. All 30 were flagged as AI by at least one detector, and 8 of them by a majority. Genesis 1 from the King James Bible was flagged by all seven detectors, and the US Constitution by six.

| Text | Written | Flagged by |
|---|---|---|
| Genesis 1 (King James Version) | 1611 | 7 of 7 |
| The United States Constitution | 1787 | 6 of 7 |
| Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (opening) | 1865 | 4 of 7 |
| Pride and Prejudice (opening) | 1813 | 4 of 7 |
| The Art of War (opening chapter) | 1910 | 4 of 7 |
| The Communist Manifesto (opening) | 1848 | 4 of 7 |
| The Declaration of Independence | 1776 | 4 of 7 |
| The Prince (chapter one) | 1908 | 4 of 7 |
| Civil Disobedience (opening) | 1849 | 3 of 7 |
| Dracula (opening) | 1897 | 3 of 7 |
| Little Women (opening) | 1868 | 3 of 7 |
| Moby-Dick (opening) | 1851 | 3 of 7 |
| The Wealth of Nations (opening) | 1776 | 3 of 7 |
| A Christmas Carol (opening) | 1843 | 2 of 7 |
| A Modest Proposal | 1729 | 2 of 7 |
| Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (opening) | 1884 | 2 of 7 |
| Jane Eyre (opening) | 1847 | 2 of 7 |
| Leviathan (introduction) | 1651 | 2 of 7 |
| On the Origin of Species (introduction) | 1859 | 2 of 7 |
| A Scandal in Bohemia (opening) | 1891 | 1 of 7 |
| A Tale of Two Cities (opening) | 1859 | 1 of 7 |
| Common Sense (introduction) | 1776 | 1 of 7 |
| Frankenstein (opening letter) | 1818 | 1 of 7 |
| Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy | 1603 | 1 of 7 |
| Heart of Darkness (opening) | 1899 | 1 of 7 |
| Meditations (book one) | 1634 | 1 of 7 |
| The Federalist No. 10 | 1787 | 1 of 7 |
| The Gettysburg Address | 1863 | 1 of 7 |
| The Great Gatsby (opening) | 1925 | 1 of 7 |
| Walden (opening) | 1854 | 1 of 7 |

## What we tested

We took 30 well-known public-domain texts from Project Gutenberg: founding documents, scripture, speeches, essays, philosophy and the openings of famous novels. From each we cut a passage of about the length used in our main test, starting at its best-known line, and ran it through the same seven detectors, with the same thresholds, that we use for the [AI detector leaderboard](/ai-detectors/).

## The texts detectors were surest about

[Genesis 1](/famous-texts/genesis-1/) was the only text that every detector flagged. Even the OpenAI RoBERTa detector, which flagged nothing else among the 30, called it AI-generated. The [US Constitution](/famous-texts/us-constitution/) followed, flagged by six detectors. Both are formal, repetitive texts, and both are among the most copied documents in English, so the language models behind many detectors have seen them many times.

That second point matters most for Fast-DetectGPT, which flags text that a language model finds predictable. It flagged 17 of the 30 texts (56.7%). The famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet passed every classifier but drew one of Fast-DetectGPT's strongest scores of the whole set. A model that knows a passage by heart finds it predictable, and the detector reads that as machine writing.

## Which detectors flagged the classics

TMR flagged 28 of the 30 texts (93.3%), which mostly reflects its reaction to [paragraph breaks](/guides/paragraph-breaks-change-ai-detector-results/). Fakespot flagged 13 (43.3%), MAGE and E5-small LoRA 6 each (20.0%), and Desklib 4 (13.3%). Five of the famous novel openings were flagged by TMR alone, while the Bible and the founding documents drew the most flags.

## Memorised text looks machine-written

A detector cannot tell the difference between text a machine wrote and text a machine has memorised. Formal, heavily quoted or rule-bound writing looks the same to it. If a student quotes scripture, a legal clause or a well-known passage, a flag is likely to follow. Our [false positives page](/false-positives/) shows the same problem with everyday human writing.

## Questions people ask

### Why do AI detectors say the Bible or the Constitution is AI-generated?

The likeliest reason is that language models have read these texts many times, so their wording looks highly predictable, and predictable wording is what many detectors treat as a sign of AI. Formal, repetitive phrasing adds to it.

### Which AI detector flagged the fewest famous texts?

The OpenAI RoBERTa detector flagged 1 of the 30, but it also misses almost all modern AI text. Among the detectors that catch a real share of AI writing, Desklib flagged the fewest, 4 of 30 (13.3%).

### Does this mean AI detectors are useless?

It means a single flag proves nothing. These texts were written between 1611 and 1925, long before AI, and detectors still called many of them AI-generated.