Somebody saw this coming

Since we’ve been discussing ChatGPT, this is a good moment to pay tribute to Roald Dahl. You might know him as the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or James and the Giant Peach.

But he was much more than that. Dahl’s stories were often dark cautionary tales. They ran the gamut from children’s stories to other more challenging tales that were definitely meant only for grownups.

One story in particular, published in 1953 — nearly 70 years ago — was The Great Automatic Grammatizator. In this story Dahl rather precisely predicts chatbots such as ChatGPT.

But in this story he does more than that. He also predicts the potentially devastating effects such a technology might have on authorship in general. Maybe you should read it.

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