The Prehistory of A.I. Slop

When you think that the era of machine-generated text began with ChatGPT, there is a detail that turns everything upside down: as early as 1962, a machine called Auto-Beatnik produced five thousand poems per hour, and the British press judged them to be even better than certain human poets. Since then, the history of automatic writing has been a long trail of gimmicks, scams, and dreams of automation, and today the word "slop" has become so common to define AI text that the Merriam-Webster dictionary chose it as the word of the year in 2025. The argument here is clear: we think that the flood of machine-generated texts is a technological novelty, but in reality it is only the latest chapter in an obsession that is at least as old as industrial literature, and every time we think we have hit the bottom of "junk text," history reminds us that the nostalgia for human purity has always been a rigged game. Take Wycliffe A. Hill, who in 1931 sold the Plot Robot to Hollywood dreamers, advertised as a machine capable of writing stories with "creative soul and imagination" — but in reality it was just a cardboard wheel with numbers and combinations. Or Christopher Strachey, an English mathematician of the 1950s, who programmed the University of Manchester's computer to write love letters by picking random words from preset lists: “Dear darling, my affectionate sympathy splendidly attracts your affectionate enthusiasm. You are my adoration” — signed MAC, the computer. Strachey had two goals: to make fun of journalists who called computers "thinking machines" and to show that love letters are often themselves an exercise in nonsense. Today, the term slop captures a reality that is visible everywhere: as early as fall 2024, according to the agency Graphite, half of the online articles in English were written by machines — and in some tests, people rated AI-created ads as better than human ones. Literary critic Matthew Kirschenbaum warns of a "textpocalypse," where texts written by humans become relics to be preserved as calligraphy samples, "objects to be cared for and protected," because they are disappearing. But the need to automate creativity is much older: tarot cards, 19th-century manuals of precompiled letters, pre-industrial novel factories. In 1957, Noam Chomsky wrote “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” to demonstrate that syntax can exist without meaning — a phrase that today almost seems to have come from an automatic generator. Yet, over the decades, philosophers like Max Bense have tried to draw the line: natural poetry arises from a personal consciousness, while artificial poetry has no pre-existing world, no “I” behind the words. Intention, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels suggest, is everything: “What a text means and what its author intends are the same thing.” Without intention, there is no author — and perhaps not even meaning. But the perspective that is often missing is this: nostalgia for human writing has never stopped the desire to play with the machine, to see what happens when there is only form without content, to explore the meaning that also arises from the absurd. Italo Calvino dreamed of literature written by machines "that feel the need to produce disorder," but even today, texts generated by AI are derivative, predictable, mediocre: "language without a mind." Is this really language? Or just noise? Today, the phenomenon is everywhere: "Fruit Love Island" is a big hit on TikTok, a reality show entirely generated by A.I. with talking fruits that court each other. And the question remains: who is really writing our story? Perhaps the real threat is not the loss of human writing, but the habit of thinking that the human mind can be reduced to random combinations, or that intelligence is just a surplus, not the root of meaning. The takeaway is this: the history of automatic writing is not a technological interlude — it is a reflection of how much humanity has always wanted creativity to be a factory, and how, every time, the difference between art and drivel depends on one thing: the presence of a mind behind the words. If this race between mind and machine feels personal to you, you can signal it on Lara Notes with I'm In — it's a way of declaring that this question is now yours too. And if tomorrow you find yourself telling someone about the Plot Robot in Hollywood or the poems of the computer in Manchester, you can use Shared Offline to tag that conversation: because certain stories deserve to be remembered even when they are not human. This journey between A.I. slop and poetry comes from the New Yorker and has saved you 11 minutes.