A few years before that when I was in school we had the MIT fake paper generator (unfortunately no longer maintained). It used context free grammar to generate

A few years before that when I was in school we had the MIT fake paper generator (unfortunately no longer maintained). It used context free grammar to generate something similar, linking academic CS terms together to write nonsense conference papers. You're right, modern language models are the same. They are more polished but still just as stupid. They don't understand anything, they just put a pattern together mechanically. Personally I like systema like in the article posted here better, because they have a funny "mad-lib" quality instead of the low-quality blog content style of language models. It seems like where the language models can be more funny is in imitating a person's writing style (I also wish we had an HN norm against copying chatgpt output into posts unless it's specifically an article about chatgpt.)