Why you should care about generative text

John Ohno
7 min readJan 13, 2016

Generative text gets some press. Unfortunately, like many other technical fields that attract shallow coverage, generative text has been the subject of minor variations on the same article every few months since the mid-1950s.

The typical article on anything related to generative text (particularly generative fiction) has the following pattern:

“[Insert quote here].”

You would think that was written by a human, wouldn’t you? Well, reader, you are a dumbass, because that was written by a machine!

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John Ohno

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net