data-driven stories

Fritz Leiber's The Silver Eggheads, originally a story in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine (1958), later expanded into a novel (1961), imagines a future in which writers are celebrities, focusing full-time on the maintenance of their extravagant public images while digital machines - "wordmills" - do the work of creating fiction. Eventually the writers revolt. Michael Frayn, meanwhile, gives us in The Tin Men (1965) the William Morris Institute of Automation Research, one of whose many dozens of departments is devoted to using computers to generate newspaper stories from recombinant storylines ("Paralyzed Girl Determined to Dance Again", "Child Told Dress Unsuitable by Teacher", and son on).