Geoff Davis' MA4 STORY GENERATOR is a pioneering text-generation software that creates unsettling variations on a base story by Davis about animal insurrection. Written in BASIC for the ZX Spectrum microcomputer, it methodically replaces words from Davis's original story, COW BOILS HEAD, with themed synonyms, generating new narratives at a hypnotic pace.
The work emerged during Britain’s BSE crisis, when the practice of feeding cattle with processed animal remains led to the widespread outbreak of "mad cow disease." Davis transforms this agricultural nightmare into a series of dark procedural fictions where different species—wolves, vultures, lizards—rise up against humanity.
Unlike modern AI's statistical approach to text generation, MA4 STORY GENERATOR uses a carefully structured "expert system" with predefined word banks. This early form of Procedural Story Generation (PSG) contrasts with today's machine learning methods, which train on vast datasets to predict likely word sequences. While contemporary curator Georg Bak describes it as "a precursor of ChatGPT," the work’s methodical deconstruction and rebuilding of narrative creates striking juxtapositions that reveal new meanings while maintaining thematic coherence.
It was released by Micro Arts on the Prestel teletext network and as a data cassette, and it was exhibited at the London Film-Makers' Coop's summer show in 1985.