[gojomo]

"It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit."

– 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about life in an incredibly accelerated world, by R.A. Lafferty in 1965

https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...

[burkaman]

This is incredible.

> A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions. “I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.

Sounds exactly like someone twiddling the knobs of an LLM.

[meindnoch]

Roald Dahl: The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1953)

https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-theg...

[peterldowns]

Ballard covered this theme a few different times in his short stories, I believe before this

[impossiblefork]

Something of that sort also exists in 1984, with the caleidoscopic plot-generation machine used for stories for the proles.

[dwaltrip]

Wow yeah very prescient.

[kaffekaka]

That is an LLM right there. Wow.

[rlt]

Three-minute dramas?! That sounds like an eternity. Most content on Tik Tok is under a minute.

[left-struck]

Drama implies something with a story.

[ok_dad]

Lookup "one minute dramas" and blow your mind.