We’ve lived but a few years so far into the age when arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence can pro­duce con­vinc­ing sto­ries, songs, essays, poems, nov­els, and even films. For many of us, these recent­ly imple­ment­ed func­tions have already come to feel nec­es­sary in our dai­ly life, but it may sur­prise us to con­sid­er how many peo­ple had long assumed that com­put­ers could already per­form them. That belief sure­ly owes in part to the roles played by effec­tive­ly sen­tient machines in pop­u­lar fic­tions since at least the ear­ly decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Revis­it­ing George Orwell’s Nine­teen Eighty-Four, we even find a device very much like today’s large lan­guage mod­els in use at the Min­istry of Truth, the employ­er of pro­tag­o­nist Win­ston Smith. With­in the Min­istry is “a whole chain of sep­a­rate depart­ments deal­ing with pro­le­tar­i­an lit­er­a­ture, music, dra­ma, and enter­tain­ment gen­er­al­ly. Here were pro­duced rub­bishy news­pa­pers con­tain­ing almost noth­ing except sport, crime and astrol­o­gy, sen­sa­tion­al five-cent nov­el­ettes, films ooz­ing with sex, and sen­ti­men­tal songs which were com­posed entire­ly by mechan­i­cal means on a spe­cial kind of kalei­do­scope known …