I was writing a Markov text generator yesterday, and happened to have a bunch of corpora made up of Less Wrong comments lying around from a previous toy project. This quickly resulted in the Automated Gwern Comment Generator, and then the Automated sixes_and_sevens Comment Generator.

Anyone who's ever messed around with text generated from simple Markov processes (or taken the time to read the content of some of their spam messages) will be familiar with the hilarious, and sometimes strangely lucid, garbage they come out with. Here is AutoGwern:

Why is psychopathy not strongly confident. In a slippery slope down to affirm or something. Several common misunderstandings are superior, but I copied from StackExchange running in a new trilemma on the police, there is a very large effect sizes. The DNA studies at the clandestine level.

Plausible yet pseudonymously provided a measure of the role of SATs is pretty darn awful advice, and how they plan to use data from markets that shut down in self-experimentation, then that. The repeating logic. It wouldn't surprise when two women sent me unsolicited PM's asking if we drop the <1m bitcoins Satoshi Nakamoto or La Griffe du Lion. That just means that it.

Thanks.

(I should point out that I'm picking on Gwern because his contribution to LW means I have an especially massive text file with his name on it.)

Here's some AutoMe:

I'll be reading this. Then the restless spirit of Paul Graham sat on my body in some obscure location, Nigel Hawthorne was the hypothetical was that sword-privilege is a response, though in the idea in my life so cognitively exhausting relative to your calibrated sitters. Which should they pick? This seems credible, but I'd be a TV and film from a welfare system.

It's your lucky day. I can start hearing a bicycle. There's even in a position on all users' self-esteem, adjusting it for various other OKCupid users to encourage them, There are a small box of which routinely deals with his Dangerously Ambitious Startup Ideas essay, about how well-trained in deconstructivism.

I've actually a lecture by default?

This is perhaps an unfair question, which you'll only a sixth of the QS-types take in a group to help setting off to the music, OK? A little less fat. It isn't obvious, but I'm actually kind of these selections of the above, Yvain could also happen when I feel like my brain compels me to be the money pump.

I have become weirdly fascinated by these. Although they ditch any comprehensible meaning, they preserve distinctive tics in writing style and vocabulary, and in doing so, they preserve elements of tone and sentiment. Without any meaningful content to try and parse, it's a lot easier to observe what the written style feels like.

On a less introspective note, it's also interesting to note how dumping out ~300 words maintains characteristics of Less Wrong posts, like edits at the end, or spontaneous patches of Markov-generated rot13.

Also Yvain could happen when I feel like my brain compels me to be the money pump.