Relatedly, the author Robert Anton Wilson tried to manually implement a Markov-chain-bot in the 1960s by cutting up passages from various books, selecting them

Relatedly, the author Robert Anton Wilson tried to manually implement a Markov-chain-bot in the 1960s by cutting up passages from various books, selecting them from a hat, and looking for overlapping words and phrase fragments. The best results were included in the Illuminatus! trilogy, some attributed to a character named Markoff Chaney.