The Great Automatic Grammatizator
by Roald Dahl · first published 1982
40% recommend60% neutral
Why HN recommends it
An engineer builds a machine that churns out cheap stories in huge volume, replacing human authors. The story is sharp and eerily prescient, offering a look at automated writing for anyone curious about it.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Is it really possible to invent a machine that does the job of a writer? What is it about a landlady's house that makes it so hard for her guests to leave? Does Sir Basil Turton value most his wife or one of his priceless sculptures? Here are thirteen of Roald Dahl's most unexpected tales, offering young readers the perfect introduction to the adult writing of a storytelling genius. From the sensitivity of stories such as 'Katina' to the surprising creepiness of 'Taste', these stories are full of all the fun, excitement and wonder of Roald Dahl's writing, offering originality, ingenuity, horro
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Good lord that's scary. Rapidly ushering in the future where none of our words are our own. Anyone ever read Roald Dahl's short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator ? 10/10 strongly recommend, about an engineer who develops a computer-like machine able to compose fiction. Googling "the great automatic grammatizator pdf" gives a .doc version as the top result, for…
on “Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail” ↗…the same feeling. Nightfall is a decent story though. But yeah, The Last Question is in a league of its own. It's one of my favorite short stories ever along with The Library of Babel by Borges, The Great Automatic Grammatizator by Roald Dahl, and "Repent, Harlequin!" said the Tick-Tock Man by Harlan Ellison.
on “The Last Question” ↗It's amazing to me how nobody seems to know about the short story "The great automatic grammatizator" by Ronald Dahl. Nobody got closer than him. I feel like I should be reading about it all the time and no one seems to have ever heard of it.
on “George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)” ↗Reminds me a little of Roald Dahl's short story "The Great Automatic Grammatizator", which is an excellent read (not quite as dark as some of his fiction, but getting there).
on “Proposals Toward the End of Writing” ↗Also check out "The Great Automatic Grammatizator" by Roald Dahl for another eerily accurate scifi description of LLMs written in 1954: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-theg...
on “iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM” ↗Reminds me of Roald Dahl's short story "The Great Automatic Grammatizator." I cannot recommend it enough. Amazing story about a future in which an engineer creates a machine that writes stories quick and cheap, thousands and thousands of them in no time at all. http://bookophile.weebly.com/uploads/6/4/0/8/6408830/the_gre...
on “Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards” ↗Cool stuff - and anticipated decades ago in Roald Dahl's "The Great Automatic Grammatizator"! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizat...
on “The strange world of computer-generated novels” ↗I remember reading the same Roald Dahl short story about Royal Jelly as part of a book called The Great Automatic Grammatizator. His short stories were all great reads for an early teenager.
on “Loyalty Nearly Killed My Beehive” ↗The Great Automatic Grammatizator, by Roald Dahl, one of the best sci fi short stories ever. This post is the story come to life. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...
on “GPT-3 writing tool that generates surprisingly compelling characters/plot twists” ↗In Great Automatic Grammatizator by Roald Dahl was one of the stories that stayed with me through the years. In the story, there is a machine that can write stories, replacing authors but they were at least paying real authors to use…
on “AI content firm creates fake writers for ai articles” ↗Roald Dahl's "The Great Automatic Grammatizator"
on “Ask HN: Can you think of a sci-fi novel that feels like ChatGPT now?” ↗…another celebrated English-language short story in a very different writing style. Red and yellow all over. Knowing full well what it would think of James Joyce, I skipped over him to try Roald Dahl's The Great Automatic Grammatizator -- red and yellow all over. Lastly, for the sake of variety, I decided to try something simple and put in large swaths of one of the original Winnie the Pooh books. Finally, something it was mostly okay…
on “When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?” ↗…imagined how people would write if they had the right technology. Places where I've already seen such stuff are Asimov's Foundation and Empire, Philip K. Dick's The Penultimate Truth, Roald Dahl's The Great Automatic Grammatizator.
on “Ask HN: Can you recommend Sci-Fi books/stories?” ↗This reminds me of the Roald Dahl short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, which, although dated, examines the possible consequences of automatically generating literature. I also think of the sci-fi short story Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson, which examines how perpetual…
on “Pentametron Reveals Unintended Poetry of Twitter Users” ↗This is almost identical to Roald Dahl's 1998 story - "The Great Automatic Grammatizator"
on “More News Is Being Written By Robots” ↗