Nick Montfort

Printed Matter · 2026

This work is based on a text generator that produces French and English news items that imagine some of the ways technology will impact us in the near future. Most of the generated news involves people getting struck by autonomous vehicles or even aircraft. Others describe labor disputes, hostile takeover attempts, inventions, and the termination of online services. What is imagined in "RT/TS" is not apocalyptic or discontinuous but actually features many of the same problems we face today; the methods of producing the texts are today's as well.

MIT Press · 2024

The discussion of computer-generated text has recently reached a fever pitch but largely omits the long history of work in this area - text generation, as it happens, was not invented yesterday in Silicon Valley. This anthology aims to correct that omission by gathering seven decades of English-language texts produced by generation systems and software, long before ChatGPT and Claude.