The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1954) [pdf]

I remember that, when I saw text-generative AI (GPT) demonstrated for the first time, I was reminded of this story. Wow, they actually made what Roald Dahl described in the nineteen-fifties!

Two further easter eggs that I particularly like about this story:

* This story appeared in Someone Like You, published in 1953 by Alfred A. Knopf. The similarity between the publisher’s name and the character’s name Adolph Knipe is likely not a coincidence.

* How very meta is the following fragment:

“For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

“Where?”

“In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.

A mechanically-minded man reasons that the rules of grammar are fixed by certain, almost mathematical principles. By exploiting this idea, he is able to create a mammoth machine that can write a prize-winning novel in roughly fifteen minutes. The story ends on a fearful note, as more and more of the world's writers are forced into licensing their names—and all hope of human creativity—to the machine.