Most of us who know the work of Roald Dahl grew up with it, eventually coming to consider the man a master of imaginative, often grotesque tales for children. A bit later on, when we heard that he’d also written books for adults, with titles like Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch, some of us sought them out as a kind of forbidden literary fruit. What tends to escape notice is that he also wrote for teenagers — or, in any case, that certain of his stories were packaged for teenagers into the posthumous volume The Great Automatic Grammatizator, whose title story has gained a new relevance in our age of ChatGPT, as explained in the new Tibees video above.
First published in 1954, “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” concerns an enormously complex, wholly analog machine that can generate page after page of text at a then-unimaginable clip. Its inventor, a beaten-down young corporate employee called Adolph Knipe, designs it based on the same principles he’d used to create an electric calculator that pleased his boss, Mr. Bohlen. A frustrated writer of fiction by night, Knipe conceives of the Grammatizator as a tool of revenge against the magazine industry that spurned him. With the company’s backing to build the thing, he tells Bohlen, they could dominate the market for short stories almost without effort — and make their own prestigious names as authors to boot.
“It stands to reason that an engine built along the lines of the electric computer could be adjusted to arrange words (instead of numbers) in their right order according to the rules of grammar,” Dahl writes. “Give it the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives, the pronouns, store them in the memory section as a vocabulary, and arrange for them to be extracted as required. Then feed it with plots and leave it to write the sentences.” Though Bohlen accepts the technical proposition, he at first doubts the commercial one, at least until his employee informs him that magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal will pay for a story “anything up to twenty-five hundred dollars”: nearly $40,000 today.
Of course, 1954 was a different time. Today, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal have all gone, as has the prospect of earning even a meager living through short stories. And a computer of this kind, as Dahl describes it, would have been an enormous, noisy device laden with buttons, dials, pedals, and stops, each of which the “writer” would use to control such variables as theme, style, tension, humor, and passion. “The quality may be inferior,” an increasingly power-mad Knipe admits of the machine’s output, “but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts.” All of us now possess Grammatizators of our own, far faster, cheaper, more versatile, and easier to use than anything Roald Dahl could have imagined. Yet how many of us can hope to be read more than 70 years in the future?
via Metafilter
Related content:
How George Orwell Predicted the Rise of “AI Slop” in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
