Algorithmic writing predates RAW. In fact, it predates computers.
I forget which one, but one of the Surrealist poets played with mathematical poetry. Words assigned numbers basically at random, then iterate through an algorithm. But that’s not a chatbot, which can repeatedly respond without the author continuing to write new text down.
Chatbots prior to a decade ago were ELIZA and similar “madlibs” styled fill-in-the-blank boilerplate garbage that failed the Turing Test at the first five minutes, and never could have made an apparently on topic post in a forum like ours.
Then someone got clever and started using Markov chains, which was a bit better but usually made random gibberish. If I recall correctly, This Is The Correct Motorcycle came from one of those in the IRC, about a year before I originally joined?
About a decade ago, things changed.
Markov chains are the low level go to still, but the data is cleaner, because there’s only three or four typing styles anyone uses now: technically correct, informal but full words, txtspk, and Aunt Sarah’s Special Facebook Post .... Very Important!!!!!!!.
This wasn’t the case before around 2008 or so, where any given person would use an essentially random mixture of of the above, plus 1337sp33k, Little kid Version Of Aunt Sarah Except i Dont know When You use Capitals So I do It randomly, and a few other oddities that haven’t survived. (Yell and scream and get locked in a rubber room if you remember .........broody anime villain teenager............. heh....)
But the big change was mixing the boilerplate responses of ELIZA type bots with markov chains and spinners (random thesaurus substitutions). The combination of these three meant that you could stay about ninety percent definitely grammatically accurate, not be obviously pulling from a predefined list, and be able to ad lib a response based loosely on how others have responded to similar stuff in the past.
That was when pinealists stopped passing the Turing Test. Even the best of them are a step below the new breed of chatbot. They hover in the grey space between old Markov chains (they have a distinctive typing style that doesn’t vary often) and new bots (they’re incapable of pretending to do more than string together gobbledygook).
