The Cold War Roots of AI Slop: From Auto-Beatnik to Textpocalypse
A New Yorker essay traces the prehistory of AI-generated text, or 'slop' (Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year), from Cold War experiments to the present. In 1962, a Librascope programmer created the Auto-Beatnik, a program that generated nonsensical free verse on an LGP-30 computer. Earlier, in 1953, mathematician Christopher Strachey wrote a love-letter generator for the Manchester University Computer. The essay connects these to 18th-century letter-writing templates, 1912's 'The Fiction Factory,' Wycliffe Hill's 1931 Plot Robot (a cardboard wheel), and Roald Dahl's 1953 story 'The Great Automatic Grammatizator.' It notes that by fall 2024, machines were writing about half of English-language articles online, according to Graphite. Literary critic Matthew Kirschenbaum warns of a 'textpocalypse.' The essay cites Dennis Yi Tenen's 2024 book 'Literary Theory for Robots,' and mentions experiments by Theo Lutz (using Kafka's 'The Castle'), Margaret Masterman (computerized haiku), and Italo Calvino's 1967 lecture 'Cybernetics and Ghosts.' It argues that AI slop is a Cold War artifact, with roots in military signal processing and the automation of knowledge.
Key facts
- Auto-Beatnik program created in 1962 at Librascope's Laboratory for Automata Research in Glendale, California.
- Christopher Strachey wrote a love-letter generator in 1953 for the Manchester University Computer.
- By fall 2024, machines wrote about half of English-language articles online (Graphite).
- Merriam-Webster named 'slop' its 2025 Word of the Year.
- Matthew Kirschenbaum warns of a coming 'textpocalypse.'
- Dennis Yi Tenen published 'Literary Theory for Robots' in 2024.
- Theo Lutz created poetry on a Zuse Z22 computer using words from Kafka's 'The Castle.'
- Margaret Masterman produced 'computerized Japanese haiku' with Robin McKinnon-Wood.
Entities
Artists
- Christopher Strachey
- Lytton Strachey
- William S. Burroughs
- Theo Lutz
- Franz Kafka
- Italo Calvino
- Margaret Masterman
- Robin McKinnon-Wood
- Noam Chomsky
- Max Bense
- Avery Slater
- Leif Weatherby
- Dennis Yi Tenen
- Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
- Nick Montfort
- Leonard Richardson
- Ryan Stearne
- Wycliffe A. Hill
- Roald Dahl
- Adolph Knipe
- Steven Knapp
- Walter Benn Michaels
- William Wordsworth
Institutions
- Librascope
- Laboratory for Automata Research
- Manchester University Computer
- Cambridge Language Research Unit
- New Yorker
- Merriam-Webster
- Graphite
- Forbes
- The Atlantic
- Duke University
- Columbia University
- Harvard University
- New York University
- TLS
- Life
- Time
- London Daily Mirror
- Observer
- Modern Mechanics
Locations
- Glendale
- California
- United States
- Boston
- Montreal
- Canada
- Germany
- Soviet Union
- Cambridge
- England
- New York City