If there is an anti-ranking list for books, this one will certainly be in the top three. The huge amount of advertisement, combined with the keywords “sex”, “taboo” and “scandal”, the tons of reviews on the subject, and the lack of any meaningful product – is as itself a success. Evidence for that is that two months after the world premiere of the “promising” movie, conspiracy theories around the title continue to fill the space.
Either the text found in the book “50 Shades of gray” is really so flat and repetitive, or the explanation for its creation is different?
A text generator platform created by an IT specialist creates random prose that is frighteningly identical to parts of the E.L. James’s trilogy. The programmer’s goal is to prove that the book is so flatly written that any computer could generate it.
How it works? The machine processes a grammar file and breaks it into a list of lexical rules, choosing arbitrary words for each part of the sentence. It sounds easy, but the developer has to write firstly the grammar file, then it is supplemented with the information needed by the machine to make the text as “Shades”, and not as the Dalai Lama for example.
The program is based on the popular computer development Dada Engine – a system for generating random texts. In 1966, Andrew C. Bulhak of Monash University created “Postmodernism Generator”- a computer program that automatically creates imitation postmodern writing.
Truth or not, the final result is – the book is still popular, and such texts only generate its undeserved popularity. So let’s put an end to it.