The Prehistory of A.I. Slop
The article discusses the early attempts at using artificial intelligence to generate creative writing, particularly recipes, highlighting the humorous and nonsensical results. It traces the history of AI writing back over 70 years, noting significant milestones such as the publication of the first book of free verse by a computer in 1964. The piece reflects on the excitement and anxiety surrounding AI's potential to surpass human creativity.
- ▪In 2017, AI researcher Janelle Shane trained a neural network to generate recipes that resulted in unappetizing and humorous combinations.
- ▪The history of coaching machines to write spans more than 70 years, with notable developments in the 1960s.
- ▪The first book of free verse written by an electronic computer was published in 1964, credited to the LGP-30 computer.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Longreads |
| Canonical URL | https://longreads.com/2026/05/20/prehistory-ai-slop/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T12:05:02.589Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T12:05:02.589Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
In 2017, AI researcher Janelle Shane trained a neural network to generate recipes. The results were what we’d call “slop” today, not just because they were nonsense but because they sounded so hilariously unappetizing. If Artichoke Gelatin Dogs don’t do it for you, then Crimm Grunk Garlic Cleas should—or, god forbid, Beef Soup with Swamp Peef and Cheese. The point is, long before ChatGPT kickstarted the modern LLM era, people have been trying to coach machines to write. How long? More than 70 years, as we learn from Jill Lepore’s rollicking ride through robo-writing history. By the early nineteen-sixties, there was enough of this kind of thing going around that it caused both a panic and understandable excitement.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Longreads.
