Paul Graham wrote about this in his book ANSI Common Lisp, in the second footnote to page 141, right at the end of Chapter Eight. Turning to the Notes section,

Paul Graham wrote about this in his book ANSI Common Lisp, in the second footnote to page 141, right at the end of Chapter Eight. Turning to the Notes section, page 401 In 1989, a program like Henley was used to simulate netnews postings by well-known flamers. The fake postings fooled a significant number of readers. Like all good hoaxes, this one had an underlying point. What did it say about the content of the original flames, or the attention with which they were read that randomly generated postings could be mistaken for the real thing? One of the most valuable contributions of artificial intelligence research has been to teach us which tasks are really difficult. Some tasks turn out to be trivial, and some almost impossible. If artificial intelligence is concerned with the latter, then study of the former might be called artificial stupidity. A silly name, perhaps, but this field has real promise - it promises to yield programs that play a role like that of control experiments. Speaking with the appearance of meaning is one of the tasks that turn out to be surprisingly easy. People's predisposition to find meaning is so strong that they tend to overshoot the mark. So if a speaker takes care to give his sentences a certain kind of superficial coherence, and his audience are sufficiently credulous, they will make sense of what he says. This fact is probably as old as human history. But now we can give examples of genuinely random text for comparison. And if our randomly generated productions are difficult to distinguish from the real thing, might that not set people thinking? The program shown in Chapter 8 is about as simple as such a program could be, and that is already enough to generate "poetry" that many people (try it on your friends) will believe was written by a human being. With programs that work on the same principle as this one, but which model text as more than a simple stream of words, it will be possible to generate random text that has even more of the trappings of meaning. Graham published ANSI Common Lisp in 1996, so the kind of program he was talking about was far inferior to GPT-3. There is an extra level of self reference when we read his footnote in 2023 and think that he is talking about today's programs rather than the incomparably weaker programs of 1989. We find the meaning that we want, even in texts that complain about us finding the the meaning that we want.