Just found out that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, written around 1948, describes a "versificator" that composes the words for songs "entirely by mechanical means" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/6/nineteen-eighty-four/
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@simon I just finished reading it for the first time a couple days ago and that was one of the many things that stood out beyond the frequent comparisons.
@simon Ha! Just watched a stage play adaptation of 1984 yesterday.
Audience laughed at that moment.
@simon It's one of those rare pieces of SciFi that gets more and more believable as time passes instead of less and less.
The telescreen, the speakwrite, the versificator, invasive surveillance, editing npast newspaper issues to suppress inconvenient truths, we now have the tech to do it all.
Where most sci-fi from the 60s and 70s feels outdated now, 1984 (which was written much earlier) just feels... a little bit quaint in terms of the vocabulary used to describe modern technology, otherwise it's spot on.
As an aside, I wish we had a modern 1984 rewrite that took what we now know and have into account. Instead of telescreens and the thought police, mandatory wristbands with a speech recognition chip and an AI system that traces political dissidents via meeting location graphs. The original is out of the public domain in most places, so such a book could realistically and legally be written. There's one I know of from the 80s (which is just as spot on), but it was written by a Polish author, and, at least to my knowledge, sadly never translated to English.
@simon given Orwell's hate of the working classes, I think he might have been saying a dumb machine is good enough to communicate with the animalistic proles rather than imagining a machine capable of producing comprehensible language?
@tal he provides one example of a song generated by the machine:
It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
@simon I can't penetrate that, to be honest, not without engaging in some projection or "hallucination" of my own anyway
@simon the newspapers sound a lot like Murdoch tbh
@simon hey, i recognize your name!
No other comment, i hit refresh on the feed before i hit the bricks.
"naming things has to be the most laid back job, just add '-er' to the end. What's that do? 'it keeps food fresh', oh, that's a fresher; i'm going on break"
@simon It's well worth reading 1984 with recent developments in mind. There's a lot more in there beyond "omg survallience and no freedoms!".
George Orwell: In my book I invented the Versificator as a cautionary tale
Gen AI company: At long last, we have created the Versificator from classic sci-fi novel Nineteen Eighty-Four!
Hat tip: https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
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