Richard Gibson: “Current debates about writing machines are not as fresh as they seem. As the footnotes of scientific papers quietly admit, much of the intellectual infrastructure of today’s advances was laid decades ago. Already in the 1940s, the mathematician Claude Shannon demonstrated that language use could be both described by statistics and imitated with statistics, whether those statistics were in human heads or a machine’s memory. As word got out about Shannon’s work, engineers and then artists tinkered with his ideas, wrote essays in which they mulled a future in which machines would write alongside us, and built the first (stuttering) generation of natural language generators. These were the first residents of the headspace into which so many of us have recently wandered.”