Computer-Generated Writing

By Marius Watz - Mail to: mailto:mariusw@notam.uio.no. Last updated: January 7th 1997 (created August 3rd 1994)

The writing of texts has always been a domain dominated by humans, for obvious reasons. Even computers, data-processors by nature, have been hard put to invade this field. The data made up of human text is highly codified and convoluted meanings. One might argue that human language is fractal, since every word has mappings into other parts of the language, often self-referential or relying on a real-life context, making "dumb" translation of the map difficult.

But even though making the computer understand human codes is hard, making it manipulate them is not. The approach of letting the computer manipulate texts as symbols is interesting both from a literary and philosophical point of view. One use of this approach is interactive text generation in order to simulate dialogue, as seen in the arch-typical Eliza type of programs or any program attempting to brave the Turing test.

Another approach is to use software to produce text, either by synthesizing from pre-existing text or by using dictionaries and rules for sentence construction. The result may often resemble cut-up techniques such as those employed by the Dadaists or W.S.Burroughs, or they may pose as texts somehow created by alien modes of intelligence, vaguely familiar yet profoundly puzzling. Either way, the use of the computer to generate texts challenges the very nature of the text and the role of the author. But the texts in themselves can also be beautiful.

This page is meant to be a storing space for computer-generated writing (CGW) and information about the field in general. All contributions are more than welcome, since there is so little information easily available. Pointers to material or texts can be sent to me, mariusw@notam.uio.no I am maintaining this page out of sheer curiosity, and I would be delighted to see what you have to show and share.

Computer-Generated Texts

• Work by Robert "R.S." Pearson
  • Rubber Blue Biodegradable Robot
  • The Lightening of Solutions Passing By
  • Robert's own Poetry and Prose page, containing his human-generated texts.
• Review of CIGARETTE BOY: A MOCK MACHINE MOCK-EPIC, an experimental novel by Darick Chamberlin that poses as machine-written text. Review by @Man (atman@ecst.csuchico.edu).
• Computer-Generated Poetry by Justin McHale, created by use of the Mark V. Chaney program found in the software section.
• A mangled text by Kevin Carhart, made with the Mac program TextMangler (available below).
• "Further Last Words of Dutch Schultz", compiled by Ficus Strangulensis and Stuart Pid. Dutch Schultz' failing words made even stranger...
• IZEN Publications, an anti-publishing house publishing anti-books. Originator of "Further Last Words of Dutch Schultz", above.
• KOMNINOS's Cyberpoetry page contain experiments with animated text, concrete poetry, artificial speech and a lot of other things...
• Rob Pike has done a version of Jean Baudrillard's essay `The Precession of Simulacra', processed by the Mark V. Shaney program.
• Have a look at my own text filtering page (part of my form gallery), where I've used filters to generate Postscript files from text files, either creating a new representation of the text or doing dictionary lookups to replace words etc. This is with a visual aesthetic in mind rather than a literary one, but interesting nonetheless.
• Not strictly computer-generated, but computer-controlled text is brilliantly used in an "elastic catalogue" for MIT Media Lab's News in the Future consortium. They use Java technology to "dynamically arrange text in a seamless animated display to provide context and guide the viewer through the collection of inter-related material."
• The Aesthetics & Computation group at MIT does very interesting work with computation-based design and interactive systems.
• Adam Zaretsky has sent me some texts (here and here) using OCR to deliberately mangle texts. His description of the method is here.

Resources Related to Computer-Generated Writing

• Charabia, a site dedicated to online french-speaking random text generation (also known as "Génération automatique de textes aléatoires")
• CMU AI Repository, which contains information that might be interesting.
• Bibliography of research on Natural Language Generation
• The Inscription Project, a project aiming to take a look at the history of writing and bring it into a modern perspective, including computer-generated writing.
• The Racter FAQ (maintained by Jorn Barger.) Racter, a commercial program by John Owens, is one of the most advanced interactive text generators developed so far. The FAQ also includes information on Inrac, a compiler for generating texts according to a sort of programming language.
• The A.Word.A.Day server runs a great service where each day a vocabulary word is presented with its definition and occasional commentary. People can subscribe to a mailing list to get the word of the day automatically. Other services available by mail are Dictionary, Thesaurus, Acronym, Anagram and Rhyme-N-Reason. For more information send an email to wsmith@wordsmith.org with the word "help" in the body.
• A Linguistics page maintained by Matterform Media, containing pointers to online dictionaries and similar linguistic resources online.
• The Surrealism Server, which contains information about automatic writing and other inspiring stuff.
• On a similar note, the Dada server. See especially the games page.
• Information about Julia the Chatterbot, a program set up to enter the Loebner Contest for Artificial Intelligence. The page includes information on the general problem of setting up a conversational robot to fool a human, as well as describing some of Julia's specific tricks.
• Eastgate Systems, a noted manufacturer of software for hypertext.
• Some pointers to hypertext fiction, maintained by Prentiss Riddle.
• Infolipo (in French) is a Swiss-based atelier for the creation of computer-aided writing as well as self-generating texts. The Infolipo web site is maintained by Ambroise Barras, and contains information about their activities as well as examples of work done in the atelier.
• R.S Pearson maintains pages on Paramind Brainstorming software and other relevant information. He also has a poetry & prose page, containing computer-generated texts.
• Charles O. Hartman has written a book called "Virtual Muse - Experiments in Computer Poetry", which deals with computer-generated writing. He has also written a program called MacProse, which you can download from his home page.
• Ole Vilhelm Larsen has written a dissertation on "Computing order-independent statistical characteristics of stochastic context-free languages". It includes a description of the "Markov chain model for stochastic linear languages".
• The TextEval project aims to perform automatic evaluation of computer-generated text, especially as used in translation of natural languages.

Software for Computer-Generated Writing

Thanks for Forrest Richey for providing a lot of the programs found here. Pointers to more of the same are received with gratefulness.

Note that I make no guarantees that any given piece of software that can be downloaded from thee pages will work on your machine. I have only experimented with a few of them, and your mileage may vary...

World Wide Web

CGW is well suited to the WWW, where script-generated text can be delivered on-the-fly. If there are more such scripts around than are listed here, please report them to me.

• Decoder-a-go-go, a nifty Web script that acts a filter between you and WWW pages, mashing them into gibberish while maintaining the structure of the Web page you are looking at. For instance, try this link to see this page all mangled up. Or try this link to see it mangle the page several times, using its own output as input.
• A nice implementation of the Swedish Chef mock-Swedissh seen originally on the Muppets Show. A script lets you type in text to be mangled.
• Trakl'Bigi, generates poems in the style of the expressionist poet Georg Trakl. Created by Michael Herrick of Matterform Media.
• Surrealist Compliment Generator
• Exquisite Cadavulator
• Colin, an Eliza-type system with emphasis on the Internet and computing.
• Postmodern Thesis Generator, by Andrew Bulhak. It generates mock theses on "postmodern" topics, complete with footnotes.
• Rant, a CGI script based upon the UNIX rant program, adapted for WWW by Erik Wistrand.
• Abuse-a-tron, your run-of-the-mill abuse.
• hAIku v.1.0, a Haiku program for WWW. For more Haiku programs, see the web-ku page that accompanies it.
• Get your dose of daily nonsense, generated by use of Markov Chains by Lawrence Hosken.
• Some Surrealist games, on the excellent Hypermedia Research Centre page.
• BABLE, a text-generating program using Markov chains, created by Marc Donis.
• CatchPhrase, a Java applet that random phrases based on built-in word lists. Quote: "Occasionally, very occasionally, it spits out something amusing. But then, perhaps you're easily amused."
• K@rlheinz Essl has made a Lexicon-Oracle which "will reveal some of the infinite secrets of the realtime composition Lexikon-Sonate, pondering about problems of algorithmic composition and postmodern philosophy, in a never repeating, always mind-challenging way. When your Browser is capable of dealing with MIDI (such as Netscape 3.0 with the LiveAudio Plug-in), you will also hear some surprising excerpts of the never-ending Lexikon-Sonate."

UNIX

• Chef, the Swedish chef as a lex script, easily compiled into a filter.
• BABLE, a text-generating program using Markov chains, comes with full source code and even a Sun4 binary.

DOS Software

All these programs come compressed in the ZIP format.

• DadaPoem Generator, a generator of nonsensical poems based on the traditional approach of looking up dictionaries and sentence syntax definitions.
• ParaMind, a commercial brainstorming system using text manipulation.
• Mark V. Chaney V1.0, a probabilistic text generator based on Markov chains.
• Babble, a babble generator with a million options. In additions to generating random texts according to analyzed text files, it can apply "filters" such as dyslexia, stuttering, code etc., modifying the output further.
• Cognate, a linguistic program for analyzing words from different languages and determining if they are likely to be derived from each other.
• Translate 1.0, a simple language translator based on word-to-word mapping. Given a nonsensical mapping, it might be used to twist texts.

Mac Software

A very good source of text-processing programs is the info-mac archive of text utilities. Check out their hypertext interface.

All the following programs have been BinHex'ed. Some are compressed with Compactor Pro in addition, to reduce size.

• Chef, a program to twist text into something similar to the gibberish uttered by the Swedish chef on the Muppets. Bork bork bork.
• Deconstructor, a program to generate new text probabilistically based on an input text. [Note: I haven't gotten this program to work, since it crashes my mac.]
• Haiku Master, a Hypercard stack to generate Haiku
• MBA Phrase Generator, a simple phrase generator intended to produce Wall Street obfuscated catchphrases.
• Merz Poetry 3.1 a Hypercard stack capable of generating poems and pictures according to Merz' DaDa rules.
• Neologism Dictionary, a dictionary of human-generated neologisms (i.e. new words constructed by combining suffixes and prefixes in a new manner.)
• PataLiterator, a Hypercard stack for randomly generating neologisms, not just based on prefixes and suffixes but also on syllables.
• TextMangler 1.2, a program for mangling texts based on Markov chains working on words. Quite amusing.
• Foggy, a Hypercard stack based on a DOS program that will generate sentences based on fixed phrases and variable syntax. The subject of the sentences include Chomskyan grammar, Software Development and Folklore Research.
• Matterform Media have several Hypercard stacks available for download here, including a poetry simulator called "Trakl'Bigi", and a conversations simulator called "Hot Springs". Created by Michael Herrick.
• RoboRiter is a poetry machine, available from the home page of its creator, Douglas L. Lieberman.
• HexOn Exon is a way around the Communications Decency Act, from Lamprey Systems.
• MacProse, written by Charles O. Hartman, can be downloaded from his home page.

Last updated: January 7th 1997 (created August 3rd 1994)

Marius Watz - Mail to: mailto:mariusw@notam.uio.no