In the 1970s, science fiction writer JG Ballard was intrigued by the growing capabilities of computers – so used one to compose poems. They were a first step on the road to ChatGPT.

The novelist and short story writer JG Ballard, is known for conjuring warped and reimagined versions of the world he occupied. Dealing with strange exaggerations of realities and often detailing the breakdown of social norms, his unconventional works are hard to categorise.

Sitting on the edge of reality, these unsettling visions often provoked controversy. Eschewing a science-fiction of the distant future, Ballard described his own work as being set in “a kind of visionary present”.

Today, as we contemplate generative AI writing texts, composing music and creating art, Ballard’s visionary present yet again has something prescient and fresh to tell us.

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The topics in Ballard’s fiction frequently reveal just how highly attuned he was to the subtleties of the emerging technological and social shifts that were, as he puts it, just below the surface. The fuse box of society was often rewired in his ideas.

And with generative AI there is undoubtedly something odd going on, to which Ballard’s attention seems to have been drawn long before it even happened.

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Looking through the archive of an old arts magazine which Ballard used to edit, I discovered that he was writing about this futuristic concept way back in the 1960s, before going on to experiment with the earliest form of computer-generated poetry in the 1970s.

What I found did more than simply reveal echoes in the past: Ballard’s vision actually reveals something new to us about these recent developments in generative AI.

Listening recently to the audiobook version of Ballard’s autobiography Miracles of Life, one very short passage seemed to speak directly to these contemporary debates about generative artificial intelligence and the perceived power of so-called large language models that create content in response to prompts. Ballard, who was born in 1930 and died in 2009, reflected on how, during the very early 1970s, when he was prose editor at Ambit (a literary quarterly magazine that published from 1959 until April 2023) he became interested in computers that could write:

I wanted more science in Ambit, since science was reshaping the world, and less poetry. After meeting Dr Christopher Evans, a psychologist who worked at the National Physical Laboratories, I asked him to contribute to Ambit. We published a remarkable series of computer-generated poems which Martin said were as good as the real thing. I went further, they were the real thing.

Ballard said nothing else about these poems in the book, nor does he reflect on how they were received at the time. Searching through Ambit back-issues issues from the 1970s I managed to locate four items that appeared to be in the series to which Ballard referred. They were all seemingly produced by computers and published between 1972 and 1977.

The first two are collections of what could be described as poetry. In both cases each of these little poems gathered together has its own named author (more of this below), but the whole collection carries the author names: Christopher Evans and Jackie Wilson (1972 and 1974). Ballard described Evans as a “hoodlum scientist” with “long black hair and craggy profile” who “raced around his laboratory in a pair of American sneakers, jeans and denim shirt open to reveal an iron cross on a gold chain”.

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Ballard’s view of the poems in 1974 seems consistent with the more recent comment included in his autobiography. A short introductory note to the second collection of pieces opens with what is said to be the “text of a letter from prose editor JG Ballard advising rejection of a well-known writer’s copy”. Apparently, Ballard wrote the following, which is quoted in brackets before the short pieces:

B’s stuff is really terrible – he’s an absolute dead end and doesn’t seem to realise it … Much more interesting is this computer-generated material from Chris, which I strongly feel we should use a section of. What is interesting about these detective novels is that they were composed during the course of a lecture Chris gave at a big psychological conference in Kyoto, Japan, with the stories being generated by a terminal on the stage linked by satellite with the computer in Cleveland, Ohio. Now that’s something to give these English so-called experimental writers to think about.

Whether these little computer-generated texts are stories, novels or poems is unclear and probably is a secondary issue to the automatic production of culture on display here. Ballard seems to have been taken with the new possibilities, and also seems to like the provocation it presents to other writers.

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    Part 2:

    Yet, we perhaps shouldn’t take his note at face value. The playful framing and anarchic tone warn us from being too literal. And there is another reason for us to tread carefully. Ballard’s interest was likely to have been piqued by these events as he had written a short story featuring machines that could perform the exact task of writing poetry some 11 years previously. The short story itself seems to present a more questioning take on what it would mean for a computer to write and create prose.

    Written in 1961, Ballard’s story Studio 5, The Stars features an editor of “an avante-garde poetry review” working on the next issue. Sounds familiar. The poets he edits regularly are all using automated “Verse-Transcribers”, which they all refer to with established familiarity as VTs. These VT machines automatically produce poems in response to set criteria. Poetry has been perfected by these machines and so the poets see little reason in writing independently of their VTs. On being passed one poem, hot from a VT, the editor in the story doesn’t even feel the need to read it. He already knows that it will be suitable.

    The poets have become used to working with their VT machines, but their reliance upon the machines for creative inspiration starts to become unsettled by events. At one point the editor is asked what he thinks is wrong with modern poetry. Despite seemingly being a strong enthusiast of the automation of creativity he wonders if the problems are “principally a matter of inspiration”. He admits he “used to write a fair amount … years ago, but the impulse faded as soon as I could afford a VT set”.

    Ballard’s story predicts that once creating poetry becomes a technical matter, the need to engage in the practice of writing evaporates. In place of creativity, the editor suggests, is a “technical mastery” that is “simply a question of pushing a button, selecting metre, rhyme, assonance on a dial, there’s no need for sacrifice, no ideal to invent to make the sacrifice worthwhile”. Not too far then from the types of prompts on which today’s generative AI relies to trigger its outputs. Often, as we saw with the examples of applications previously mentioned, a set of criteria, a phrase or any type of written instruction are used to initially direct the outputs of generative AI.

    A mysterious figure named Aurora, the story’s antagonist, proclaims dismissively that “they’re not poets but mere mechanics”. When all the VT sets in the local area are wrecked by Aurora to “preserve a dying art”, the absence of human creativity is exposed.

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    The editor is left with the next issue of the magazine to fill and no automated copy to fill it. There is shock at Aurora’s suggestion to “Write some yourself!” Tony, the editor’s associate, offers some consolation, reminding him archly that “Fifty years ago a few people wrote poetry, but no one read it. Now no one writes it either. The VT set merely simplifies the whole process.”

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    Whether what we are seeing with these 1970s poems is genuine or if it is some sort of performance or playful satire, it still reveals something of the emerging attitudes to the possibilities of computational creativity in its very early forms.

    Ballard’s enthusiastic response to the new possibilities suggested by the poems in the 1970s contrasts with the more dystopian vision in his 1961 short story. Ballard seems to embody what I have called the tensions of algorithmic thinking – by which I mean the unresolvable and competing forces that push simultaneously in different directions when we are confronted with advancing automation. On one side we have the problem of the removal of the human from human activities, on the other we have the removal of knowledge from cultural creation. The short story and the poems in Ambit both capture the tension that accompany today’s AI generated text, art, and music.

    We are perhaps being shown from different perspectives, to use Ballard’s own phrasing, the wiring and fuse box of creativity. Ballard’s attention was drawn towards “something odd going on”. That oddness is becoming even more profound as the use and applications of generative AI continue to expand.