In last week’s Literacy Links, I discussed a recent episode of the ABC radio program The Minefield which explored the moral consequences of artificial intelligence in social, cultural, and educational contexts. Hosted by Scott Stephens and Waleed Aly, the program called for an intelligent response to applications such as ChatGPT, advocating a greater focus on critical thinking and academic rigour. In this episode, Scott Stephens referred to a 1954 short story written by prolific British writer Roald Dahl. Seventy years ago, Dahl predicted the rise of ChatGPT in his story ‘The Great Automatic Grammatizator’. This short story is a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of prioritising ease and profit over the human capacity for thinking and creativity. I shared this story with my Year 9 English class this week and Dahl’s message was keenly evident to all.

‘The Great Automatic Grammatizator’ is an unsettling story which centres on two very flawed characters, Adolph Knipe and John Bohlen. Knipe is a genius in the computing field who aspires to be a famous writer of fiction. Although very successful in his professional work, Knipe is deeply frustrated by his own artistic limitations. Bohlen is the head of Knipe’s electrical engineering firm. The two men participate in a venture which sees the creation of a machine which generates stories at the press of a button at very little cost. Knipe concludes that ‘an engine built along the lines of the electric computer could be adjusted to arrange words in their right order according to the rules of grammar. Give it the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives, the pronouns, store them in the memory section as a vocabulary, and arrange them to be extracted as required. Then feed it with plots and leave it to write the sentences.’

While Knipe’s motivation for creating this machine appears to be fuelled by bitterness and resentment, he promotes the idea to Bohlen by emphasising how profitable it could be. ‘The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories – well – they’re just another product’. Both Knipe and Bohlen attach their names to the stories generated, and gain reputations as prolific writers. But critical acclaim is not enough, and Knipe sets out to buy the ‘brands’ of famous writers, seeking permission to use their names and writing styles, replacing them entirely with the machine. Knipe makes the decision to concentrate only on the mediocre writers as the better writers are ‘not quite so easy to seduce’.

Dahl’s story ends on an alarming note. He writes in the persona of a writer who refuses to yield, warning, ‘And worse is yet to come’. He goes on to say, ‘And all the time the screw turns tighter for those who hesitate to sign their names. This very moment, as I sit here listening to the howling of my nine starving children, I can feel my own hand creeping closer and closer to that golden contract that lies on the other side of the desk.’ The closing line of the tale is a particularly chilling prayer: ‘Give us the strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve.’

Clare Murphy

English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach