The other day I discovered The Great Automatic Grammatizator, a wickedly satirical short story written in 1953 by Roald Dahl that pretty much sums up a good chunk of the bot-making, content-generating community I try to bring together with Bot Summit and especially NaNoGenMo (where people spend November writing code that generates a 50,000 word novel).
I was giving a talk where Jenna Fizel was in attendance and she alerted me to The Great Automatic Grammatizator. It's is a short story about a brilliant young computer engineer named Adolph Knipe who yearns to be a writer but can never quite cut it. He's written hundreds of short stories and all have been rejected by multiple magazines. (We only see a brief excerpt from one but it's hilariously bad. I would be lying if I said I didn't identify deeply with Knipe.) One day he's thinking idly about revenge on the editors who have rejected him 500+ times, and
Then gradually (the head still motionless), a subtle change spreading over the face, astonishment becoming pleasure, very slight at first, only around the corners of the mouth, increasing gradually, spreading out until at last the whole face was open wide and shining with extreme delight. It was the first time Adolph Knipe had smiled in many, many months.
"Of course," he said, speaking aloud, "it's completely ridiculous."
This is literally what I experienced when I first conceived and proposed the idea for NaNoGenMo.
Dahl then goes into the theory of text generation, and is actually pretty much technically correct about how it works! It's incredible. He talks about how computers can't think, but they do have memory, so why not just give it a library of English grammar rules and 500 or so plots and then see what it can spit out? This is literally what we do during NaNoGenMo, for the most part. He even talks like a NaNoGenMo contributor:
English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness! Given the words, and given the sense of what is to be said, then there is only one correct order in which those words can be arranged.
No, he thought, that isn't quite accurate. In many sentences there are several alternative positions for words and phrases, all of which may be grammatically correct. But what the hell. The theory itself is basically true.
"What the hell. The theory itself is basically true" could be the NaNoGenMo motto. It's pretty much verbatim what I think when I embark on NaNoGenMo attempts.
The living-room became littered with sheets of paper: formulae and calculations; lists of words, thousands and thousands of words; the plots of stories, curiously broken up and subdivided; huge extracts from Roget's Thesaurus; pages filled with the first names of men and women; hundreds of surnames taken from the telephone directory
Uh, I believe Dahl just described my Corpora project, which is a compilation of list of things (like names and plot points and cities and so on) that can be used for generative art.
Dahl even understands the nature of bugs:
Knipe smiled and pressed the selector button marked Reader's Digest. Then he pulled the switch, and again the strange, exciting, humming sound filled the room. One page of typescript flew out of the slot into the basket.
"Where's the rest?" Mr Bohlen cried. "It's stopped! It's gone wrong!"
"No sir, it hasn't. It's exactly right. It's for the Digest, don't you see?"
This time it began. "Fewpeopleyetknowthatarevolutionarynewcurehasbeendiscoveredwhichmaywellbring-permanentrelieftosufferersofthemostdreadeddiseaseofourtime…" And so on.
"It's gibberish!" Mr Bohlen shouted.
"No, sir, it's fine. Can't you see? It's simply that she's not breaking up the words. That's an easy adjustment. But the story's there. Look, Mr Bohlen, look! It's all there except that the words are joined together."
This has happened to me countless times. Knipe, I feel ya. output.join(' ');, ya know?
And finally we have the impetus for NaNoGenMo itself:
"Everyone tells me I ought to do a novel," Mr Bohlen cried. "All sorts of publishers are chasing after me day and night begging me to stop fooling around with stories and do something really important instead. A novel's the only thing that counts – that's what they say."
Novels are harder to generate than short stories or tweets, which is what's fun about an event where you generate them!
So... Dahl is basically prophetic here. In fact, the only thing truly anachronistic about Dahl's story is the assertion that writers must get paid well by magazines that print their stories. Although I'm pretty sure that's part of his satire as well. If you want to find the story you can buy it on Amazon or uh... probably find it very quickly and conveniently otherwise.