This is incredible.
> A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions. “I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.
Sounds exactly like someone twiddling the knobs of an LLM.
Wow yeah very prescient.
Something of that sort also exists in 1984, with the caleidoscopic plot-generation machine used for stories for the proles.
Ballard covered this theme a few different times in his short stories, I believe before this