Here's an article from LIFE magazine from March 3 1961 about a text generator that does some form of beatnik poetry and it is almost as good as a real thing. At least for the disinterested and uninitiated.
The tone of the piece is a mix of tongue-in-cheek amazement and goodhearted irony. But nevertheless it is really curious piece of history. 1961 was the very infancy of the Natural Language Processing - but even then there was this semi-mocking tone regarding what NLP is capable of. And the poem is decent enough.
I think Lew Welch would have been a fan of this thing - there is this smoky blur of similarity of his cadences and of the generated poem.
Anyway. As a writer, text generation is one of my areas of interest. It is a tool worth exploring. And not because it can do job for you.
The poem itself is the representative of the procedural text generation variety. In essence, it is a cookie-cutter template-based way of producing text out of available elements without taking context or semantics into consideration. It is as blunt and unelegant as it gets. Usually, the results are clumsy and borderline demented. But only if you expect it to do text writing the right way. If not - it can be incredibly efficient at its job if you know how to use it.
I can go even further and claim that of all its types, procedural text generation is probably the greatest application of natural language processing ever.
Cue Inception BRAAAAAM.
Let's unpack this.
3 Procedural Text Generation is based on an assumption that grammar rules and vocabulary is all there is for language. Such vital parts of the language as onthological and aesthetic contexts or semantics are left out of the picture for sake of keeping things simple. In other words, PTG assumes that "map IS territory".
1 Then there the generative infrastructure - it is more or less a Rube Goldberg machine. Eerily futile, blunt instrument.
It is a structure marked by placeholders and there is an inventory out of which the result is constructed. In fact, this structure is the text, except it is not, but it shapes the result.
There can also be some rules that affect the choice of words, but it is optional. It can run at random just fine.
2 Traditionally, the formation of text is bound by narrative. Its intention is to transmit some sort of information.
On the other hand, the intention of PTG is to generate a text entity, not narrative or evoke imagery. Thus, the central element of PTG mechanism is more or less doing snapshots of the indeterminacy.
From the existential standpoint, the choice is rooted in numerous factors. But what if we take out factors completely and leave it blank - what kind of choice it will be? It won't be because it is a completely different thing now. It just operates similarly. That's where procedural text generation magic kicks in.
4 Basically, what happens is - a bunch of stuff is being thrown together and by accident it generates sense to the reader because the reader bears the baggage of experience and context and is able to embalm a piece of text with meaning. The text itself remains empty. It was made to be made.
This is substantially different approach that explores other facets of perception and cognition.
On the other hand, because the text in this set-up is not actually the text but the template and its inventory - it turns the creative process the inside out. Instead of conveying meaning - the spotlight is on the framework and its potential to generate combinations.
The sum of parts generates new entity that contains information shaped in a certain way that is not really saying anything but can be interpreted if necessary.
As a result, procedural text generation allows us to peek at the strange parallel dimension where things look mostly the same but function differently. The whole method opens up different creative possibilities in terms of interaction with the text and constructing narratives.
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