Most people who know about our work roald dahl He grew up with it and eventually came to think of this man as a master of imaginative and often grotesque stories for children. A little later, when I heard that he was also writing a book for adults with the title: kiss kiss and switch bitchsome of us sought them out as a kind of forbidden literary fruit. What is often overlooked is that he also wrote for teenagers, or, in any case, that some of his stories were packaged for teenagers in his later works. great automatic grammarizerAs explained in , the title piece has acquired new relevance in the era of ChatGPT. New Tibees video on.
First published in 1954, “The Great Automatic Grammarizer” is about a highly complex, completely analog machine that could generate text page by page at a clip that was unimaginable at the time. The product’s inventor was a depressed young office worker named Adolf Kneipp, who designed it based on the same principles he used to develop an electric calculator that pleased his boss, Mr. Bohlen. Kneipp, a frustrated fiction writer by night, came up with Grammatizator as a tool for revenge against the magazine industry that had degraded him. With the company’s support, he told Bolen, he could corner the short story market with little effort and gain fame as a writer.
“It stands to reason that an engine built in the vein of electrical computers could be tuned to place words (instead of numbers) in the correct order according to grammatical rules,” Dahl wrote. “Give them verbs, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns and store them as a vocabulary in the memory section so they can be extracted as needed. Then give them a plot and let them write the sentences.” Bohlen is open to technical suggestions, but was initially suspicious of commercial ones, at least until his employees informed him about magazines like the magazine. saturday evening post, colliersand ladies home journal He plans to pay “anything up to $2,500” for a story. Today it’s almost $40,000.
Of course, 1954 was a different time. today, saturday evening post, colliersand ladies home journal All that disappeared, just as any possibility of making even a small living from short stories disappeared. And, as Dahl explains, this type of computer is a huge, noisy device full of buttons, dials, pedals, and stops, each of which the “writer” uses to control variables such as theme, style, tension, humor, and passion. “The quality may be lower,” admits the increasingly power-mad Mr. Kneipp of the machine’s output. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is the cost of production.” We now have our own grammarization tools that are much faster, cheaper, more versatile, and easier to use than anything Roald Dahl could have imagined. But how many people can expect their work to be read more than 70 years from now?
via metafilter
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Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages ​​and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
