The Prehistory of A.I. Slop

Was Milo mewling thrilling radishes? So, our anchovies are sad but green.

He called his program the Auto-Beatnik, cunningly deploying Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs as cover for this bilge. The ploy occasionally paid off; the London Daily Mirror described the Auto-Beatnik’s poetry as “better than most of the stuff that gets published in avant garde magazines.” The literary début of the Auto-Beatnik, a machine that could compose five thousand poems in an hour or so, caught the attention of Time, Life, and the Times. In an inversion of the more common critical reception of an emerging artist, this new writer’s poetry was often noticed but seldom admired, notwithstanding the Daily Mirror’s snide enthusiasm. In 1963, a story in the Observer about automated poetry ran with a cartoon of a guy feeding a slip of paper reading “ART” into a computer that, at the other end, spat out a paper reading “TRA.” The “SH,” I guess, was implied: in went art, out came trash. Lately, this kind of junk has become known as A.I. slop—“slop” was Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year—and it’s everywhere, gumming up the works, slowing down traffic, and making a god-awful mess. It brings to mind the time, in 1919, that a tank in Boston containing nearly two and a half million gallons of molasses burst, and a fearsome wave of syrup reportedly fifty feet high and travelling at thirty-five miles an hour (faster than you’d expect, really) flooded the city. The cleanup of the Great Molasses Flood took weeks, and, for months, everywhere that anyone had tracked molasses, including underground subway platforms, was still tacky. Even years later, on hot days, the North End smelled like a gingerbread house. Machine-generated writing, though it doesn’t smell as sweet, has something of molasses’s smothering stickiness. One way to think about the internet is that it’s an attempt to archive nearly everything ever written by anyone who ever lived. Recently, more and more new writing online is being produced by bots, during this, the Great A.I.-Slop Flood. Ante-ChatGPT, more than ninety-eight per cent of all English-language articles being published on the internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half of such articles, according to the digital-marketing agency Graphite, which, far from taking umbrage at the usurpers, recommends using A.I. to help run your ad campaigns. And why not? In one blind test, people found A.I.-generated advertisements to be “of higher quality” than ads made by humans. And that’s not counting social media or e-mail or all the robot-written rubbish that comes your way by text or voice mail or pop-up customer-service chats. YouTube is overrun with slop. Reddit is caked in it. Much of Facebook is nothing but slop. The literary critic Matthew Kirschenbaum warns of a coming “textpocalypse” that will render the words you’re reading right now—this word, and this one—relics your grandchildren will frame on a wall, a daguerreotype, a needlepoint sampler. “Like the prized pen strokes of a calligrapher, a human document online could become a rarity to be curated, protected, and preserved,” Kirschenbaum writes. Can the textpocalypse be stopped? “Rest assured 2026 will be the beginning of AI slop purge,” Forbes promised, sloppily, at the start of this year. This was hardly reassuring. My anchovies are still sad. Random-story generators are even more ancient: that, after all, is what tarot cards are. (You can read about some of these antecedents in Dennis Yi Tenen’s breezy 2024 book, “Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write,” an introduction that, despite its title, isn’t really a work of literary theory but instead engages in “patiently assembling the modern chatbot from parts found on the workbench of history.”) As industrialization advanced, the factory replaced the wheel of fortune as a metaphor for how things happen in the world. A 1912 writing guide, “The Fiction Factory,” advised, “A writer is neither better nor worse than any other man who happens to be in trade. He is a manufacturer. After gathering his raw product, he puts it through the mill of his imagination.” This only accelerated with the factory that was Hollywood. In a 1919 writing guide, “Ten Million Photoplay Plots,” a grifter named Wycliffe A. Hill told would-be screenwriters that there are thirty-seven possible story lines that can be combined with a measurable number of characters, situations, and subplots to produce the mathematically precise total of 10,494,360 plots. After the coining of the word “robot,” in 1920, in the internationally popular Czech play “R.U.R.,” and the attendant cultural fascination with mechanical men, Hill published a follow-up manual in 1931 that included what he called the Plot Robot. As an ad for it in Modern Mechanics promised:

Formerly robots were merely mechanical devices that could perform a variety of stunts under the guidance of a human being, but now a robot has made its appearance that thinks, has a soul of a kind, creative imagination, and other qualities necessary for writing a modern stereotyped short story. . . . Now if you want to become a successful author simply obtain a robot and put it to work.

In fact, there was no robot. If you bought the book, you found out that the Plot Robot was a cardboard number wheel. This grift is still going. These days, you can buy Writing Dice to help you with your novel: Nine dice! “Thousands of combinations, you’ll never fear the blank page again!” Actual robot writing dates to 1953, when the mathematician Christopher Strachey, a nephew of the writer Lytton Strachey, he of the Bloomsbury group, wrote a computer program that could generate love letters like this one:

Honey Dear My sympathetic affection beautifully attracts your affectionate enthusiasm. You are my loving adoration: my breathless adoration. . . . Yours wistfully M. U. C.

Think of it as Mad Libs before there was Mad Libs. Strachey instructed M.U.C., the Manchester University Computer, to fill in the blanks in template sentences by drawing randomly from a list of words identified by their parts of speech: “My — (adj.) — (noun) — (adv.) — (verb) your — (adj.) — (noun).” He then posted the letters on campus. Among Strachey’s motivations for building a cyber Cyrano was to poke fun at credulous reporters who described computers as “thinking machines.” His program, he insisted, was “almost childishly simple.” Because Strachey was thought to have been gay, scholars have read the letters as making fun of straight romance. Or, I’d have said, any romance. Incontestably, love letters are, very often, slobbering slop. Lest Strachey’s epistles seem antiquated compared with the stuff that comes your way these days, I might mention that, while I was writing this essay, a writer friend texted me an A.I. e-mail she’d just received that purported to be from a British novelist: “Happy weekend, Elise! Quick bulldozer boost (spam-free!) your toy-truck kid spark + 28-book marathon inspire; let’s swap suspense secrets 15 mins this week? When will work reply today? Warmly, Alice Feeney.” Dear Honey-Dew you are my greatest whiskers my utter moonbeam. Strachey’s work is the starting point for an engrossing collection, “Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953-2023,” edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort, but they do not note that 1953 is also the year that Roald Dahl published his story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” in which an engineer named Adolph Knipe convinces his boss, Mr. Bohlen, that they could make a killing by using a computer to write cheap, shitty stories:

“Nowadays, Mr Bohlen, the hand-made article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country—you know that. Carpets . . . chairs . . . shoes . . . bricks . . . crockery . . . anything you like to mention—they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories—well—they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country! We’ll corner the market!”

Knipe builds the machine and it’s like they’re printing money. Dahl concludes:

This last year—the first full year of the machine’s operation—it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were produced by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator. Does this surprise you? I doubt it. And worse is yet to come.

It came. Experiments like Strachey’s were part of an explosion of postwar research on the relationship between mathematics and language, expressions of a broader fascination with the automation of knowledge, which crossed disciplines and suffused the culture. Among the many unknowns of the Cold War was the extent to which the world was random or ordered. Could the Soviet Union’s next move be predicted, or not? “Artificial intelligence” emerged from “intelligence” in the sense of espionage, as computers were deployed to do signal processing—the search for patterns in radio broadcasts and in printed texts like newspapers. Teaching a machine to read becomes useful when you’re spying on a twentieth-century enemy. That it could learn to write was a bonus that contributed to a revolution in linguistics and in poetics, too. In the nineteen-fifties, the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence—both terms were coined that decade—were increasingly concerned with the simulation of human intelligence and with the translation of human (or “natural”) language. Linguists were turning language into codes, too. In “Syntactic Structures,” published in 1957, the year a science-fiction magazine cover pictured a robot reading a book, Noam Chomsky illustrated the separability of syntax from meaning with the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” the kind of thing that might have been written either by the Auto-Beatnik or, to be fair, by an actual Beatnik. Circa 1959, William S. Burroughs started experimenting with writing poetry by cutting up pieces of prose and pasting them together on a page, as in a poem made of newspaper stories about 1) the polio virus and 2) a performance at the Met:

The girls eat morning dying peoples to a white bone monkey in the Winter sun touching tree of the house. $$$$

At the same time, and using a rather similar method, the German mathematician Theo Lutz created poetry on a Zuse Z22 computer by writing a program that drew from, or cut up and pasted together, random words from Franz Kafka’s “The Castle”:

Every stranger is far. A day is late. Every house is dark. An eye is deep.

The Zuse Z22’s poetry was reviewed in the T.L.S., where it elicited the opinion that the elimination of meaning was hardly impressive: “What really matters is to eliminate sense.” By the early nineteen-sixties, there was enough of this kind of thing going around that it caused both a panic and understandable excitement. “The Machines Are Taking Over: Computers Outdo Man at His Work Now—and Soon May Outthink Him,” a headline in Life warned in 1961. What was billed as “the first book of free verse written by an electronic computer” was published in Montreal in 1964, and was credited to “the author, an electronic computer, the LGP-30, which composed the automatic sentences in this collection.” Those sentences included this one: “La pomme ajuste le monde, mais la pluie s’embellit pour les raisins.” (“The apple shapes the world, but the rain enhances the grapes.”) Was it art? Nah, but it was interesting. In 1962, the German philosopher and semiotician Max Bense, who had supervised Lutz’s work, attempted to draw a distinction between natural and artificial poetry. Natural poetry, Bense wrote, “has as its prerequisite . . . a

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