Opinion | When Computers First Wrote Poetry

The warning was stark and unambiguous: “No one is quite ready to admit computing machines as full-fledged members of the human race but let’s face it—they’re getting closer.”

That was in 1961.

The term “artificial intelligence” wasn’t in common use, but the Los Angeles Mirror, a now-defunct afternoon newspaper, was telling readers about a puzzling development at a Southern California computer manufacturing company.

“Believe it or not,” the story said, “the men who handle the care and feeding of the electronic monsters at the Librascope division of General Precision, Inc., in Glendale have got the darn things writing poetry.”

The poems might not emulate Robert Frost or Carl Sandburg, the story said, but that wasn’t the point: “The poetry kick is a research project directed toward finding better, faster and less expensive ways of stimulating the machines into intelligent reactions. . . . The computer can store more information, with total recall, than a human, can correlate more data, and compare a much larger number of possible answers than a person.”

The implications were clear: If researchers developed the computer’s capabilities fully enough, it might surpass humans in thinking, planning and acting. Most Americans were paying attention to other things in late 1961—the race to send men to space, the arrival of color television, the afterglow of the summerlong Mickey Mantle-Roger Maris home-run chase—so the goings-on at the computer lab in California were mostly regarded as a curiosity.

But it was conceivable, the Mirror cautioned, that someday “the machine is likely to come up with fresh, flexible ideas”—that is, to think on its own. And in an eerie precursor to today’s concerns about AI agents defying their human masters, the first machine used for the project “outgrew its electronic britches”—became so smart that it required larger hardware.

Some of the machine’s output was treated as an amusement. One of its early poems read: “Oh, panic not to this docile juice / Finally, few of my jackets did distrust the goose.” But the Mirror predicted: “In time, perhaps a computer will write a book.”

A few days later Tom Horan, an executive of Bendix Corp., let the paper know that his company’s G-15 computer had already done just that: a 511-page hardcover volume called “Angular Indexing Tables” about “dividing a circle into any number of equal divisions.” Two employees, he said, had fed the computer basic information, and the machine had written the book in 112 hours. Horan said that because of its arcane subject matter “the book will never make the bestseller list,” but it had already sold more than 300 copies.

If the machines were someday to develop enough intelligence, artificial though it might be, to render us obsolete, was there any hope for mere flesh-and-blood men and women?

Matt Weinstock, a longtime Mirror columnist, offered a glimmer of optimism: “I get the feeling that if and when computers are admitted to the human race they’ll want out.”

Mr. Greene’s books include “Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights.”