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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

There was a short story I read back in the early 80s (although it was much older), which predicted LLMs—albeit rather oddly. The system had a chimpanzee connected to a computer (the chimp being the magic sauce to make the AI work). You could give it the beginning of a text and it would create the ideal ending. An author was using it to argue with his editor about a scene break and they used the beginning of Hamlet’s soliloquy (“to be or not to be…” to demonstrate the system before giving it the author’s story to see what it did. I’ve thought about this story a lot lately, and would love to turn it up again.

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I couldn't resist and asked ChatGPT what your story is. The Monkey's Finger by Asimov?

That's got to be it and it's poetic that ChatGPT found it.

I just had it find a book that I read as a boy, with one prompt, that I looked for for years. I googled for hours, of course google is bad at this type of thing. But, amazing it found it so quickly.

There was a point before Google got “smart” searches when it could find stuff like this more easily. I used it to turn up things I’d read thanks to remembering just a line or two from the book.

Emule.

In this case, I remembered high-level plot details and nothing else. I read it when I was 7 or 8. I really did, over many years use web searches to find this book. Probably from 2007 to 2013. I think that was the time when Google was good. FWIW, this is the prompt:

What is the name of the book about a young American Indian boy whose grows up in the the of Indian culture being wiped our. His parents are killed and he becomes a bull rider, has many injuries, goes back home to find peace in nature where he grew up?

That’s the piece. I knew it was either a story by Asimov or something in a collection he had edited. (Of course, I also needed to confirm that this was really the name of the story and not something that ChatGPT fabricated.)

roald dahl also had a story ("the great automatic grammatizer") where computers could write in the style of any writer, and a corporation was basically approaching writers and buying up the rights to their names. more poignant than asimov's.

That story sounds a bit like Galley Slave: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_Slave

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