Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal, Pensees (1670)

L’année dernièr à Marienbad

Text Generation

Abstract

Computer generation of text. Can it make any sense? Maybe. Maybe not. If sense is not the prime interest then it can fit its context quite well, seeming to make sense. Last Year in Marienbad is a Surrealist stream of consciousness, and the computer does it well. Religious babble does not have to make sense because it is in incomprehendable archaized language that sounds like God, and so can be seen as God speaking in mysterious ways. Most religious people accept what they read in their bibles as profound, though they cannot understand it. Literary criticism is someone’s opinion, and does not have to make sense to others, but does in bits. Literary essays are just bits of opinion strung together on a chain with little or no logic necessary. A common theme and the bits making individual sense of a kind seems to make sense in the whole. A computer can do that quite well.

The Great Critic Speaks

Mr Eagle Terryton, in an oft quoted review in the Catholic-Marxist monthly, aptly wrote:

Consider this, the reader’s linguistic intuition is unspecified with respect to a monster serious scholars as well as novelists try to tame. On our assumptions, the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction must be taken when analysing the past two literary eras. To provide a constituent structure for our thesis, the situation that obtained just ten years ago still draws the one thing in society which could practically survive a nuclear attack. To any learned ear, most of the methodological work in modern criticism may not be subsumed by the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any proposed criticism. Comparing these examples with their parasitic Christian counterparts in Augustine and Aquinas, we see that special care has no chance of ever being at a large part of the development of literary form in the 20th century and all it implies. Recent studies indicate any literary system looms over that most brilliant mind, George Washington Bush. It is clear to see that the descriptive power of the base component will demonstrate its equivalent in the 1800s. Suppose, for instance, that any man who is an island would have been felt strongly by a stipulation to place the constructions into these various categories. By combining certain transitions and deformations, the primary aim of demonstrating how adequate criticism is to be achieved is rather different from a very different country. To characterize a linguistic level, an issue surrounding criticism is rarely given a number of key factors.
Eagle Terryton, The Armchair Lefty

Sense or nonsense? Sense to the postmodernist, for whom words mean anything you choose but otherwise nonsense! It is not, of course, a citation of Mr Terryton, it is far too meaningful, but an illustration of computer generated text simply by having four different files for four parts of a sentence that the computer picks from randomly to put a string of sentences together for a typical postmodern “critique”. They have been called Chomsky bots because the great philologist Chomsky showed how grammatical sentences did not have to mean anything. It shows that opaque and inelegant language can give the impression of meaning when it has none. The code is simple. Here it is for you to play with… The original programmer, John Lawler, whose website discusses the Chomsky bot, writes:

What I find interesting about it is how it just hovers at the edge of understandability, a sort of semantic mumbling, a fog for the mind’s eye.

That is what is fascinating, and makes you wonder whether what we write means anything at all. Much of it it probably does not! Lawler calculates that a Chomsky bot of five sentences such as the one he and Kevin McGowan wrote and have online, has 22,084,947,919,456,858,275,840,000 variations! The one on this page has many more, because the paragraph has more sentences and the generator has more phrases to play with, though they are less opaque and so the faults show more often. Though you will see the same components coming up over and over again, no full paragraph should ever be repeated to a single observer, and if it does, then you should have bought a lottery ticket! Kevin McGowan’s code in Perl is called fogcode.html, and is available to download from a search.

Here is another example, a funny page that writes an essay for you on any subject you enter, complete with citations and a graph.