One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to "fake" conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which exist only to make money. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (for example, check out the gibberish on the WMSCI 2005 website). Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005!
The authors intend to attend the conference in question and deliver a randomly-generated talk.
A sample of its output (without the authentic-looking graphs), excerpted from a paper titled "Refining DNS and Suffix Trees with OWLER":
We have taken great pains to describe out evaluation setup; now, the payoff, is to discuss our results. We ran four novel experiments: (1) we deployed 86 Atari 2600s across the underwater network, and tested our checksums accordingly; (2) we ran 34 trials with a simulated instant messenger workload, and compared results to our hardware deployment; (3) we measured flash-memory space as a function of ROM speed on a Motorola bag telephone; and (4) we asked (and answered) what would happen if mutually replicated vacuum tubes were used instead of I/O automata. All of these experiments completed without LAN congestion or 10-node congestion.
I take my hat off to them. When I wrote the Postmodernism Generator, all those years ago, I was sceptical of the possibility of successfully generating convincing random text in a more objectively verifiable field, such as computer science. I guess that, if those responsible for reviewing the paper aren't bothered to actually read it and attempt to assemble a mental model of what it states, one can get away with anything.
I think these programs would be good for making stock market columns too. Just insert comapny names and bank names, throw in a few random numbers and acronyms, and you have something fit for the backpage of the Financial Times!
I didn't know you wrote the Pomo generator... keep up the good work! Anyway, a philosopher I know could tell it was computer generated because the sentences are too grammatically sound. Oh well.
Hey, I saw that as well....it's v funny. Congrats...
Still waiting to have the time to implement my version of the dada engine - the "Andrew Bolt opinion piece generator"
Who knows - maybe I could spit out enough to actually get a job at the HS equiv here in slobart, "the mercury"