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I can’t believe no one’s mentioned the Harry Potter fanfic written by a Markov Chain. If you’re familiar with HP, I highly recommend reading Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash.

Here’s a link: https://botnik.org/content/harry-potter.html

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Genuine question: Why would anyone want to read that? I glanced at the first sentence and decided not to go any further.

It is hollow text. It has no properties of what I'd want to get out of even the worst book produced by human minds.

Even more sophisticated models have a ceiling of pablum.

While hollow, it is also bad (and absurd) enough to be quite entertaining. It’s from an era where this wasn’t far off the state of the art for coming up with machine-generated text—context that makes it quite a bit funnier than if it were generated by an LLM today.

That said, it’s obviously not to everyone’s tastes!

It's purely meant to be an absurdist read. It obviously makes no sense, yet is close enough to actual language patterns for (some, at least) people to find it hilarious. I had tears in my eyes from laughing way too hard when I first read it.

That reads as coherently as a pile of Zen koans.

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