{"id":59,"date":"2026-05-20T06:05:46","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T06:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59"},"modified":"2026-05-20T06:05:46","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T06:05:46","slug":"the-prehistory-of-a-i-slop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59","title":{"rendered":"The Prehistory of A.I. Slop"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

In 1962, a programmer at Librascope, a California-based defense contractor, announced that \u201ca computer can be programmed to write meaningful and relevant sentences in proper English.\u201d At Librascope\u2019s Laboratory for Automata Research, in Glendale, he\u2019d started out by feeding into his computer\u2014the vacuum-tube LGP-30\u2014a vocabulary of thirty-five hundred words and a repertoire of a hundred and twenty-eight sentence patterns, and told it to do, more or less, what humans did in the nineteen-nineties when they stuck Magnetic Poetry on the doors of their refrigerators. And behold! \u201cBroccoli is often blind,\u201d the LGP-30 tapped out on its typewriter, and \u201cCommunism is more porcelain than albino gold.\u201d The engineer decided to set this machine-generated text as free verse:<\/p>\n

Read more What the Gerrymandering Wars Mean for the Midterms\u2014and 2028<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Was Milo mewling thrilling radishes?
So, our anchovies are sad but green.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/div>\n

He called his program the Auto-Beatnik, cunningly deploying Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs as cover for this bilge. The ploy occasionally paid off; the London Daily Mirror<\/em> described the Auto-Beatnik\u2019s poetry as \u201cbetter than most of the stuff that gets published in avant garde magazines.\u201d<\/p>\n

The literary d\u00e9but of the Auto-Beatnik, a machine that could compose five thousand poems in an hour or so, caught the attention of Time<\/em>, Life<\/em>, and the Times<\/em>. In an inversion of the more common critical reception of an emerging artist, this new writer\u2019s poetry was often noticed but seldom admired, notwithstanding the Daily Mirror\u2019s<\/em> snide enthusiasm. In 1963, a story in the Observer<\/em> about automated poetry ran with a cartoon of a guy feeding a slip of paper reading \u201cART<\/em>\u201d into a computer that, at the other end, spat out a paper reading \u201cTRA<\/em>.\u201d The \u201cSH<\/em>,\u201d I guess, was implied: in went art, out came trash.<\/p>\n

Lately, this kind of junk has become known as A.I. slop\u2014\u201cslop\u201d was Merriam-Webster\u2019s 2025 Word of the Year\u2014and it\u2019s everywhere, gumming up the works, slowing down traffic, and making a god-awful mess. It brings to mind the time, in 1919, that a tank in Boston containing nearly two and a half million gallons of molasses burst, and a fearsome wave of syrup reportedly fifty feet high and travelling at thirty-five miles an hour (faster than you\u2019d expect, really) flooded the city. The cleanup of the Great Molasses Flood took weeks, and, for months, everywhere that anyone had tracked molasses, including underground subway platforms, was still tacky. Even years later, on hot days, the North End smelled like a gingerbread house.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Machine-generated writing, though it doesn\u2019t smell as sweet, has something of molasses\u2019s smothering stickiness. One way to think about the internet is that it\u2019s an attempt to archive nearly everything ever written by anyone who ever lived. Recently, more and more new writing online is being produced by bots, during this, the Great A.I.-Slop Flood. Ante-ChatGPT, more than ninety-eight per cent of all English-language articles being published on the internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half of such articles, according to the digital-marketing agency Graphite, which, far from taking umbrage at the usurpers, recommends using A.I. to help run your ad campaigns. And why not? In one blind test, people found A.I.-generated advertisements to be \u201cof higher quality\u201d than ads made by humans.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s not counting social media or e-mail or all the robot-written rubbish that comes your way by text or voice mail or pop-up customer-service chats. YouTube is overrun with slop. Reddit is caked in it. Much of Facebook is nothing but<\/em> slop. The literary critic Matthew Kirschenbaum warns of a coming \u201ctextpocalypse\u201d that will render the words you\u2019re reading right now\u2014this word, and this one\u2014relics your grandchildren will frame on a wall, a daguerreotype, a needlepoint sampler. \u201cLike the prized pen strokes of a calligrapher, a human document online could become a rarity to be curated, protected, and preserved,\u201d Kirschenbaum writes. Can the textpocalypse be stopped? \u201cRest assured 2026 will be the beginning of AI slop purge,\u201d Forbes<\/em> promised, sloppily, at the start of this year. This was hardly reassuring. My anchovies are still sad.<\/p>\n

The idea of mechanically produced prose or poetry is not especially new. Eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals provided fill-in-the-blank templates, because many types of correspondence are set forms: letters of condolence, say, or letters of recommendation. Anxiety about machines replacing humans as writers, and replacing good writing with bad, is also older than you might think. Mid-nineteenth-century commentators, overwhelmed by the era\u2019s flood of cheap printed material, especially periodicals and novels, imagined a \u201cNew Magazine Machine\u201d that could spit out cheap pulps, and a \u201cBook-Making Machine,\u201d a literary successor to Charles Babbage\u2019s Analytical Engine.<\/p>\n

Random-story generators are even more ancient: that, after all, is what tarot cards are. (You can read about some of these antecedents in Dennis Yi Tenen\u2019s breezy 2024 book, \u201cLiterary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write,\u201d an introduction that, despite its title, isn\u2019t really a work of literary theory but instead engages in \u201cpatiently assembling the modern chatbot from parts found on the workbench of history.\u201d) As industrialization advanced, the factory replaced the wheel of fortune as a metaphor for how things happen in the world. A 1912 writing guide, \u201cThe Fiction Factory,\u201d advised, \u201cA writer is neither better nor worse than any other man who happens to be in trade. He is a manufacturer. After gathering his raw product, he puts it through the mill of his imagination.\u201d This only accelerated with the factory that was Hollywood. In a 1919 writing guide, \u201cTen Million Photoplay Plots,\u201d a grifter named Wycliffe A. Hill told would-be screenwriters that there are thirty-seven possible story lines that can be combined with a measurable number of characters, situations, and subplots to produce the mathematically precise total of 10,494,360 plots. After the coining of the word \u201crobot,\u201d in 1920, in the internationally popular Czech play \u201cR.U.R.,\u201d and the attendant cultural fascination with mechanical men, Hill published a follow-up manual in 1931 that included what he called the Plot Robot. As an ad for it in Modern Mechanics<\/em> promised:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

Formerly robots were merely mechanical devices that could perform a variety of stunts under the guidance of a human being, but now a robot has made its appearance that thinks, has a soul of a kind, creative imagination, and other qualities necessary for writing a modern stereotyped short story.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Now if you want to become a successful author simply obtain a robot and put it to work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In fact, there was no robot. If you bought the book, you found out that the Plot Robot was a cardboard number wheel. This grift is still going. These days, you can buy Writing Dice to help you with your novel: Nine dice! \u201cThousands of combinations, you\u2019ll never fear the blank page again!\u201d<\/p>\n

Actual robot writing dates to 1953, when the mathematician Christopher Strachey, a nephew of the writer Lytton Strachey, he of the Bloomsbury group, wrote a computer program that could generate love letters like this one:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Honey Dear
My sympathetic affection beautifully attracts your affectionate enthusiasm. You are my loving adoration: my breathless adoration.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.
Yours wistfully
M. U. C.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Think of it as Mad Libs before there was Mad Libs. Strachey instructed M.U.C., the Manchester University Computer, to fill in the blanks in template sentences by drawing randomly from a list of words identified by their parts of speech: \u201cMy<\/em> \u2014 (adj.) \u2014 (noun) \u2014 (adv.) \u2014 (verb) your<\/em> \u2014 (adj.) \u2014 (noun).\u201d He then posted the letters on campus. Among Strachey\u2019s motivations for building a cyber Cyrano was to poke fun at credulous reporters who described computers as \u201cthinking machines.\u201d His program, he insisted, was \u201calmost childishly simple.\u201d Because Strachey was thought to have been gay, scholars have read the letters as making fun of straight romance. Or, I\u2019d have said, any romance. Incontestably, love letters are, very often, slobbering slop.<\/p>\n

Lest Strachey\u2019s epistles seem antiquated compared with the stuff that comes your way these days, I might mention that, while I was writing this essay, a writer friend texted me an A.I. e-mail she\u2019d just received that purported to be from a British novelist: \u201cHappy weekend, Elise! Quick bulldozer boost (spam-free!) your toy-truck kid spark + 28-book marathon inspire; let\u2019s swap suspense secrets 15 mins this week? When will work reply today? Warmly, Alice Feeney.\u201d Dear Honey-Dew you are my greatest whiskers my utter moonbeam.<\/em><\/p>\n

Strachey\u2019s work is the starting point for an engrossing collection, \u201cOutput: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953-2023,\u201d edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort, but they do not note that 1953 is also the year that Roald Dahl published his story \u201cThe Great Automatic Grammatizator,\u201d in which an engineer named Adolph Knipe convinces his boss, Mr. Bohlen, that they could make a killing by using a computer to write cheap, shitty stories:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\u201cNowadays, Mr Bohlen, the hand-made article hasn\u2019t a hope. It can\u2019t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country\u2014you know that. Carpets\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. chairs\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. shoes\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. bricks\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. crockery\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. anything you like to mention\u2014they\u2019re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn\u2019t matter. It\u2019s the cost of production that counts. And stories\u2014well\u2014they\u2019re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods. We\u2019ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We\u2019ll undercut every writer in the country! We\u2019ll corner the market!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Knipe builds the machine and it\u2019s like they\u2019re printing money. Dahl concludes:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

This last year\u2014the first full year of the machine\u2019s operation\u2014it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were produced by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.
Does this surprise you?
I doubt it.
And worse is yet to come.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It came.<\/p>\n

Like artificial intelligence itself, A.I. slop is an artifact of the Cold War. The U.S. sought to defeat the spread of Communism<\/em>, a stingingly grumpy T-shirt might read, and all we got was the death of books, bookstores, newspapers, and authors.<\/em><\/p>\n

Experiments like Strachey\u2019s were part of an explosion of postwar research on the relationship between mathematics and language, expressions of a broader fascination with the automation of knowledge, which crossed disciplines and suffused the culture. Among the many unknowns of the Cold War was the extent to which the world was random or ordered. Could the Soviet Union\u2019s next move be predicted, or not? \u201cArtificial intelligence\u201d emerged from \u201cintelligence\u201d in the sense of espionage, as computers were deployed to do signal processing\u2014the search for patterns in radio broadcasts and in printed texts like newspapers. Teaching a machine to read becomes useful when you\u2019re spying on a twentieth-century enemy. That it could learn to write was a bonus that contributed to a revolution in linguistics and in poetics, too.<\/p>\n

In the nineteen-fifties, the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence\u2014both terms were coined that decade\u2014were increasingly concerned with the simulation of human intelligence and with the translation of human (or \u201cnatural\u201d) language. Linguists were turning language into codes, too. In \u201cSyntactic Structures,\u201d published in 1957, the year a science-fiction magazine cover pictured a robot reading a book, Noam Chomsky illustrated the separability of syntax from meaning with the sentence \u201cColorless green ideas sleep furiously,\u201d the kind of thing that might have been written either by the Auto-Beatnik or, to be fair, by an actual Beatnik. Circa 1959, William S. Burroughs started experimenting with writing poetry by cutting up pieces of prose and pasting them together on a page, as in a poem made of newspaper stories about 1) the polio virus and 2) a performance at the Met:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The girls eat morning
dying peoples to a white bone monkey
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0in the Winter sun
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0touching tree of the house. $$$$<\/p>\n

Read more The Generation That Will Always Be Too Young to Smoke<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the same time, and using a rather similar method, the German mathematician Theo Lutz created poetry on a Zuse Z22 computer by writing a program that drew from, or cut up and pasted together, random words from Franz Kafka\u2019s \u201cThe Castle\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Every stranger is far. A day is late.<\/em>
Every house is dark. An eye is deep.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Zuse Z22\u2019s poetry was reviewed in the T.L.S<\/em>., where it elicited the opinion that the elimination of meaning was hardly impressive: \u201cWhat really matters is to eliminate sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the early nineteen-sixties, there was enough of this kind of thing going around that it caused both a panic and understandable excitement. \u201cThe Machines Are Taking Over: Computers Outdo Man at His Work Now\u2014and Soon May Outthink Him,\u201d<\/em> a headline in Life<\/em> warned in 1961. What was billed as \u201cthe first book of free verse written by an electronic computer\u201d was published in Montreal in 1964, and was credited to \u201cthe author, an electronic computer, the LGP<\/em>-30, which composed the automatic sentences in this collection.\u201d Those sentences included this one: \u201cLa pomme ajuste le monde, mais la pluie s\u2019embellit pour les raisins<\/em>.\u201d (\u201cThe apple shapes the world, but the rain enhances the grapes.\u201d) Was it art? Nah, but it was interesting.<\/p>\n

In 1962, the German philosopher and semiotician Max Bense, who had supervised Lutz\u2019s work, attempted to draw a distinction between natural and artificial poetry. Natural poetry, Bense wrote, \u201chas as its prerequisite\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. a personal poetic consciousness,\u201d whereas, in artificial poetry, there is \u201cno personal poetic consciousness with its experiences, adventures, feelings, memories, thoughts, imaginative conceptions, etc., that is, no pre-existent world, and in which writing is no longer an ontological continuation through which the world aspect of the words could be related to a self.\u201d An artificial poem is a poem without a poet.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no accident that Bense wrote about artificial poetry, not artificial prose. In Bertram and Montfort\u2019s book, the section on poetry is also by far the longest one. Machine-generated text could be baffling: random, and unexpected. Maybe a computer was a new tool for understanding poetry. \u201cYou will say that to use a computer to write poetry is like using a crane instead of a pen to write a letter,\u201d the British philosopher and computational linguist Margaret Masterman admitted in 1964, but, with the computer, she argued, \u201cwe can at last study the complexity of poetic pattern.\u201d<\/p>\n

Masterman, who studied philosophy and language with Wittgenstein, was, in 1956, the founder and director of the Cambridge Language Research Unit. (Earlier, she\u2019d written novels.) She was a pioneer in machine translation, and her early work established the basic methods of information retrieval. She believed computers could come to understand meaning, and to generate it. She also tried to make that art, producing, with her colleague Robin McKinnon-Wood, \u201ccomputerized Japanese haiku,\u201d like this one: \u201call white in the buds \/ I flash snow peaks in the spring \/ bang the sun has fogged.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Few writers were as enthusiastic about robot writing as Italo Calvino. In his 1967 lecture \u201cCybernetics and Ghosts,\u201d Calvino complained that \u201cthe use so far made of machines by the literary avant-garde is still too human,\u201d and predicted that a \u201ctrue literature machine\u201d would someday emerge, one that rejects rules and forms and \u201citself feels the need to produce disorder.\u201d Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, Calvino\u2019s dream of truly original machine literature has yet to be realized: so far, the machine hasn\u2019t, in Calvino\u2019s formulation, felt the need to produce disorder, which is to say, literature. Instead, text produced by large language models, however remarkable, sophisticated, and even occasionally wondrous, is derivative, average, predictable. It is language without a mind. But is that even language?<\/p>\n

In 1982, in an article called \u201cAgainst Theory,\u201d the literary scholars Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels proposed a thought experiment to show how hard it is \u201cto imagine a case of intentionless meaning.\u201d Suppose you\u2019re on a beach and discover, written into the sand, this message:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

A slumber did my spirit seal;
\u00a0I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
\u00a0The touch of earthly years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you didn\u2019t recognize the verse as Wordsworth\u2019s, you might not worry about its author or its author\u2019s intention. You\u2019d just recognize it as writing and try to understand its meaning. But what if, while you were staring at those lines in the sand, a wave came and washed them away, and, when the wave ebbed, it left in its wake another stanza?<\/p>\n

\n
\n

No motion has she now, no force;
\u00a0She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth\u2019s diurnal course,
\u00a0With rocks, and stones, and trees.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Well, then you\u2019d have to wonder: Who wrote this, and why, and how? Wordsworth\u2019s ghost? The sea itself? God? For Knapp and Michaels, meaning without intention does not exist: \u201cWhat a text means and what its author intends it to mean are identical.\u201d An author without an intention, they argued, is not an author.<\/p>\n

Maybe that\u2019s a good definition of slop. Quick bulldozer boost (spam-free!) your toy-truck kid spark + 28-book marathon inspire; let\u2019s swap suspense secrets 15 mins this week?<\/em><\/p>\n

The end of the Cold War very nearly coincided with the opening of the internet to the public. In the decades since, theorizing of the relationship between natural and artificial literature spawned a whole new academic field, generally within English departments. Courses in what might be described as robot lit are now being offered at universities that include Duke, Columbia, and Harvard. The literary critic Avery Slater argues that computer scientists, military labs, and corporations participated with poets in the Cold War-era creation of what she calls \u201cpost-automation poetics,\u201d a sensibility that brought together both an artistic vision and an engineering scheme. What was exciting about artificial poetry was that it had no author, no context, no history. It was nothing but form. It therefore had\u2014has\u2014a lot to teach the world about both language and art. A new theory of A.I. slop, however, has yet to emerge, nor a real answer to Wordsworth on the beach. I had no human fears.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the development of natural-language processing continued in universities, defense labs, and corporate R. & D. departments. Literary experiments with computer-generated text borrowed from that research\u2019s developing tools, such as topic spotting. This led to some wacky writing. After the founding of National Novel Writing Month, computer-generated-text devotees founded National Novel Generation Month, in 2013. Leonard Richardson\u2019s \u201cAlice\u2019s Adventures in the Whale\u201d is a retelling of \u201cAlice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland\u201d with all its dialogue replaced with dialogue from \u201cMoby-Dick\u201d: \u201c\u00a0\u2018Can\u2019t sell his head?\u2014What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me?\u2019 thought Alice.\u201d One important tool in early natural-language-processing work was ranking the frequency of word sequences. Using that technique, along with early summarizing tools, the Canadian writer Ryan Stearne cut \u201cThe Old Man and the Sea\u201d down to a two-thousand-word short story called \u201cOld Sea.\u201d<\/p>\n

About a decade and a half ago, the Auto-Beatnik tradition re\u00ebmerged on social media, in seemingly automated accounts like @Horse_ebooks, a viral sensation, with posts like: \u201c(using fingers to indicate triangular shape) SMELL SMELL SMELL GOOD NEW NEW NEW<\/em> slice drink MATCH SPARKLER<\/em> (thrown in air) STARS STARS STARS<\/em>,\u201d and, most memorably, \u201cDear Reader, \/ You are reading.\u201d In 2013, The Atlantic<\/em> dubbed the account\u2019s output \u201cthe Most Successful Piece of Cyber Fiction, Ever.\u201d Disappointingly, it was soon revealed that @Horse_ebooks wasn\u2019t an automated account but was instead put together by two guys, and I\u2019m not even sure why.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing wrong with nonsense. But it\u2019s not always poetry. And mistaking one for the other is another legacy of how the Cold War foreshortened the humanistic possibilities of the intellectual revolution of the past eighty years\u2014a revolution that has, miraculously, allowed people to communicate with machines using human languages. Shouldn\u2019t this be one of the most exciting times in history to be studying language, literature, and literary theory? In \u201cLanguage Machines,\u201d Leif Weatherby, N.Y.U.\u2019s director of digital humanities, points out that, in the years since the Cold War, \u201cthe humanities lost language\u201d to cognitive science and computer science. Given that machines can generate language without recourse to reason\u2014he argues that the two things have been radically decoupled\u2014what\u2019s needed now is \u201ca theory of meaning in the absence of intelligence.\u201d Language no longer distinguishes humans, Weatherby says, dismissing the contention, made by Chomsky and others after the release of ChatGPT, that L.L.M.s \u201cdiffer profoundly from how humans reason and use language.\u201d Weatherby calls this, in a curious choice of metaphor, \u201cremainder humanism\u201d: \u201ca humanism without a theory or doctrine of what is human, in which humanity is remaindered, like a book past salability.\u201d<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s what it means, now, to be human\u2014to cling to the idea of a relationship between language and reason\u2014I don\u2019t think I mind being a book, even a remaindered one, shelved in the dark downstairs of a bookstore and priced cheap. Is the alternative really so enticing? This winter, the most popular series on TikTok was reportedly \u201cFruit Love Island,\u201d an entirely A.I.-generated version of \u201cLove Island\u201d featuring talking fruit. \u201cWelcome to Fruit Love Island, where eight single fruits are about to flirt, fight, and trust,\u201d it goes. Dear Honey-Dew you are my greatest whiskers my utter moonbeam.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Yours beautifully Manchester university computer.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Something big is happening, something fascinating: we can talk to machines. \u201cWe do not have language yet for this twist in our plot,\u201d Weatherby writes. The contention is that something big is happening to us, that someone else, something else, is writing the plot. But shouldn\u2019t we be writing it? Because, so far, that plot is slop.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more The Fastball Has Never Been Faster<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jill Lepore chronicles the rise of machine-generated writing, from a Hollywood plot-writing grift and Cold War computer poetry to the age of ChatGPT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":58,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-critic-at-large"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Prehistory of A.I. Slop - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Prehistory of A.I. Slop - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jill Lepore chronicles the rise of machine-generated writing, from a Hollywood plot-writing grift and Cold War computer poetry to the age of ChatGPT.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-05-20T06:05:46+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/40eb88ae41839037b32bb534d504a7a6.webp\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1280\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"720\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/webp\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"18 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"The Prehistory of A.I. Slop\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-05-20T06:05:46+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59\"},\"wordCount\":3680,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/40eb88ae41839037b32bb534d504a7a6.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"A Critic at Large\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59\",\"name\":\"The Prehistory of A.I. Slop - City Relocation News\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/40eb88ae41839037b32bb534d504a7a6.webp\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-05-20T06:05:46+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/40eb88ae41839037b32bb534d504a7a6.webp\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/40eb88ae41839037b32bb534d504a7a6.webp\",\"width\":1280,\"height\":720},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=59#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"The Prehistory of A.I. Slop\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/\",\"name\":\"City Relocation News\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\",\"name\":\"admin\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"admin\"},\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?author=1\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Prehistory of A.I. Slop - City Relocation News","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The Prehistory of A.I. Slop - City Relocation News","og_description":"Jill Lepore chronicles the rise of machine-generated writing, from a Hollywood plot-writing grift and Cold War computer poetry to the age of ChatGPT.","og_url":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59","og_site_name":"City Relocation News","article_published_time":"2026-05-20T06:05:46+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1280,"height":720,"url":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/40eb88ae41839037b32bb534d504a7a6.webp","type":"image\/webp"}],"author":"admin","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"admin","Est. reading time":"18 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59"},"author":{"name":"admin","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/#\/schema\/person\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4"},"headline":"The Prehistory of A.I. Slop","datePublished":"2026-05-20T06:05:46+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59"},"wordCount":3680,"commentCount":0,"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/40eb88ae41839037b32bb534d504a7a6.webp","articleSection":["A Critic at Large"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59","url":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59","name":"The Prehistory of A.I. Slop - City Relocation News","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/40eb88ae41839037b32bb534d504a7a6.webp","datePublished":"2026-05-20T06:05:46+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/#\/schema\/person\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/40eb88ae41839037b32bb534d504a7a6.webp","contentUrl":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/40eb88ae41839037b32bb534d504a7a6.webp","width":1280,"height":720},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=59#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The Prehistory of A.I. Slop"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/#website","url":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/","name":"City Relocation News","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/#\/schema\/person\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4","name":"admin","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"admin"},"sameAs":["http:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com"],"url":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?author=1"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/58"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}