A Critic at Large

The Prehistory of A.I. Slop

Before ChatGPT, there was the Plot Robot, Auto-Beatnik, and a century’s worth of schemes for automating authorship.
By Jill Lepore
Machine with text printing out from the bottom.
During the Cold War, a period when computation and linguistics converged, having a machine that could read was useful when you were spying on your enemies. That it could learn to write was a bonus.Photo illustration by Jack Smyth; Source photograph from Getty
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