Roald Dahl's “The Great Automatic Grammatizator”

That language is mathematical and conceivably can be automated like a calculator is no new thought as many pre-Modern language "versifiers" and other tools have taught us. But still something is particularly prescient about this Roald Dahl mid-century description of something approaching an LLM.

Dahl's collection of short stories Someone Like You, published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1953, includes ours of interest: “The Great Automatic Grammatizator.” Its hero, Adolph Knipe, an engineer who has helped build a giant computing machine, decides that English grammar follows rules almost as strict as mathematics and builds a machine that writes stories and novels to order. He and his employer, Mr. Bohlen, flood the market, then pay real authors to put their names to machine-written books and stop writing. In a tragic twist, the narrator, a writer, is one of the few who refuses, and his children go hungry.

It's a bleak tale of an author's insecure anxieties decades too soon. But it seems to be coming truer by the day in the 2020s.