The Prehistory of A.I. Slop

In 2017, AI researcher Janelle Shane trained a neural network to generate recipes. The results were what we’d call “slop” today, not just because they were nonsense but because they sounded so hilariously unappetizing. If Artichoke Gelatin Dogs don’t do it for you, then Crimm Grunk Garlic Cleas should—or, god forbid, Beef Soup with Swamp Peef and Cheese. The point is, long before ChatGPT kickstarted the modern LLM era, people have been trying to coach machines to write. How long? More than 70 years, as we learn from Jill Lepore’s rollicking ride through robo-writing history.

By the early nineteen-sixties, there was enough of this kind of thing going around that it caused both a panic and understandable excitement. or 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.