6th July 2025
There was 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 as a versificator. [...]
It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.
— Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell predicts generative AI, published 1949
Recent articles
- My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026
- Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026
- Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? - 5th March 2026