Fritz Leiber, 'Silver Eggheads'
"A wordmill is like an electric computing machine, except it handles words, not numbers. It's like the big chess-playing war-making machine, except it makes its moves in a novel instead of on a board or battlefield. But a wordmill is not alive like a robot and it cannot move around. It can only write fiction books. [...] Now, it's like this-there are any number of ways to tell a story. [...] The ways depend on the words that are chosen. But once one word is chosen, the other words must fit with that first word. They must carry the same mood or atmosphere and fit into the suspense chain with micrometric precision (I'll explain that later). A wordmill is fed the general pattern for a story and it goes to its big memory bank [...] and picks the first word at random; they call that turning trump. Or it's given the first word by its programmer. But when it picks the second word it must pick one that has the same atmosphere, and so on and so on. Fed the same story pattern and one hundred different first words - one at a time, of course - it would wnte one hundred completely different novels."
The whole premise of 'Silver Eggheads' is that writers (which are, basically, prompters for wordmills who are also actors for fake writer names put on these novels) broke their wordmills as an act of rebellion, and turns out, humanity didn't know how to write novels anymore, not even those writers who broke the machines in order to return to geniune human expression.
Hence novels central point of working with perserved brains-in-jar (titutal Silver Eggheads) of previous generations in order to feed public appetite for wordchew that the literature had became by that point, as the rest of the world (including the writers) had their ability to write atrophied.
As the novel was in written in 60s, Leiber imagined wordmills to be something physical, something that could be personally affected by people working on them, not something simulatenous remote and hidden but always within the reach via internet.
In a way Leiber also predicted putting (fake) human face on those wordmill novels, similar to a premise of "Elize" (the game where you play a human face to AI psychotherapist), understanding that without even this little fake pretense on humanity nobody would care about wordmill output.
I've read this novel many years ago and I remembered this particular moment since, because I thought it to be utterly dystopian, with books as nothing more that a unmemorable chew where 'writers' are actors playing as writers, and the world unable to write anymore.
We are not at this point yet.
But the generative text prediction in this novel is rather uncanny.