2026-09-06 16:24 UTC
I have only just learned that Arthur C Clarke invented (as well as communications satellites and his many other inventions) modern LLM text generators.
The story is The Steam-powered Word Processor, 1986, and includes:
A vicar bored with writing sermons, which he realised consisted of subsets of the same text rearranged in slightly different ways each week "... conceived a machine which would automatically reassemble massed of text in any desired order ...".
And to train it?
"Before the machine could be used, [he] was faced with the laborious task of punching not only the Bible but the whole of Cruden's Concordance on to Jaquard cards ..."
Replies (2)
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@hzulla@infosec.exchange 2026-09-07 08:21
@TimWardCam@c.im Roald Dahl published a short story "The Great Automatic Grammatizator" in 1953 that accurately predicts how a generative AI text generator works and what economic pressure it would inflict on authors. https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-thegreatautomaticgrammatizator.pdf
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@technicaladept@techhub.social 2026-09-06 16:36
@TimWardCam@c.im Julia, in Orwell’s 1984, operated a novel writing machine.