Happy Thought for 25 July 2025
Have a Happy Thought:
Reading truly is a way to explore other minds and other worlds. Science-fiction especially is a great way to explore possible futures. From Star Trek communicators inspiring the popularity (if not the development) of flip phones...
...To the terrifyingly accurate description of American politics in the mid 2020’s in Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and sequels...
...And then there is Roald Dahl foretelling ChatGPT.
Yep, you read that right. The author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG accurately described today’s “AI” language generators, in his 1953 short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator”. It’s a short read, and well worth it, here are the things that really impressed me.
Dahl forecast:
the over-use of strange or exceptionally long words
real life: words like comprehend, boast, swift, meticulous, and delve
Dahl: “For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing.”
Prompts
real life: you can literally take classes on this...
Dahl: the genius [inventor] had not only adapted the machine for novel writing, but had constructed a marvellous new control system which enabled the author to pre-select literally any type of plot and any style of writing he desired
"in the style of"
real life: “Scraping” (aka stealing) copyrighted books
Dahl: The third row of buttons gave a choice of literary style: classical, whimsical, racy, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, feminine, etc.
Side note: yes, I laughed uproariously when reading the list of styles, ending in the names of three famous male authors... and then “feminine”
Producing content you... really didn’t ask for
Real life: “hallucinations”
Dahl: All of [the new stories]—except one, which for some reason came out a trifle lewd—seemed entirely satisfactory.
AI-generated content is overtaking human-written words
- Dahl: 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 ... the Great Automatic Grammatizator.
- The
impact on society
Real life: you decide
Dahl: the last line (I'll let you read it for yourself)
Finally, I just have to share this lovely bit of cross-language punnery...
Image showing a person making a stinky face at a cat’s rear end. The text reads: When French people hear “chat GPT”, what they hear is chat, j'ai pété which in English means Cat, I farted.
This weekly email has always been, and will remain, a LLM-free zone.
Thank you to the author/regular reader (you know who you are) who had me watch the 2023 Wes Anderson production "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar", which led to me picking up the book "The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl" at a used book sale... which led to me reading "The Great Automatic Grammatizator.
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