Text, Image, and Music Generating Programs Predating Contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI)

An illuminated manuscript with robots in the background and a robot hand reaching from out of frame to touch the book's pages. Image generated with Stable Diffusion.

As part of my research into generative artificial intelligence, I’ve been looking at precursors, such as algorithmic text, image, and music generators. This page collects the posts that I’ve made about each program for generating text and images that isn’t using contemporary large model approaches to generative AI. I’ll add links to this page as I publish additional posts about this kind of software.

For the most part, these pre-AI text generating programs rely on a corpus (vocabulary) and grammar (rules) to generate different kinds of phrases, sentences, paragraphs, poems, etc. by randomly choosing from the corpus according to the grammar. These pre-AI image generators tend to rely on algorithms that use fractal geometry among other techniques to create patterns, shapes, and landscapes.

Text Generating

Image Generating

Music Generating