"Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas by his contrivance the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study."
- Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Swift's satire anticipates the concept of algorithmic text generation, which is now a reality with modern AI. AI models can produce coherent text by combining words and ideas based on underlying algorithms, similar to what Swift's fictional Engine is meant to do.