Bullshit Generator

A sentence like "consciousness is the quantum field of infinite awakening" is built to be impossible to disagree with. Every word is abstract, so your brain fills the gaps with its own meaning and then credits the sentence for the feeling. The less a statement commits to, the fewer places it can be wrong.

Psychologists have actually studied this. In 2015 a team led by Gordon Pennycook showed people randomly assembled spiritual-sounding sentences and asked how profound they were. Plenty of readers rated the random text as meaningful, and the ones who rated it highest also tended to be more accepting of conspiracy claims and alternative medicine, and less likely to stop and check a tricky question. The paper is titled "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit", and that is where the phrase comes from.

Business jargon works the other way round from spiritual jargon but lands in the same place. It sounds precise, technical and busy, so nobody wants to admit they cannot picture what "operationalize our customer journey guardrails" means in practice. Saying nothing at length is also politically safe: you cannot be held to a promise you never made in plain words.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt drew the line in a 1986 essay that Princeton reprinted as the small book On Bullshit in 2005. A liar knows the truth and works to hide it, so a liar is still paying attention to what is true. A bullshitter is indifferent: the goal is to give an impression, and whether the words happen to be accurate is beside the point. Frankfurt argued this makes bullshit the worse of the two, because a lie at least treats the truth as something that matters. He also noticed when it gets produced: whenever someone is obliged to speak about a subject beyond what they actually know. That describes a lot of meetings.

Try to draw the sentence, or ask what would have to be true for it to be false. If nothing changes when you swap two nouns around, or if you cannot name a single thing that someone would actually do differently on Monday morning, you are reading the same thing this page generates. Two more quick tests: delete every adjective and see whether anything is lost, and count how many of the words could be replaced by "thing" without anyone noticing.

Andrew Bulhak, then at Monash University, wrote the Dada Engine, which builds text from recursive grammars, and pointed it at academic postmodernism. Reload the page and you get a whole essay, section headings and footnotes included, signed by an invented department. Richard Dawkins liked it enough to quote it in Nature in 1998.

Dack Ragus sat on Miami Beach in January 2000 listing every dot-com phrase he could stand, then wired the list to a button. Verb, adjective, noun, done. That three-slot pattern is the ancestor of every corporate bullshit generator since, this one included, and the original is still sitting there on dack.com.

Three MIT students built SCIgen to write fake computer science papers, complete with graphs and citations, and got one accepted at a conference. The joke aged badly. In 2014, after the researcher Cyril Labbé went looking, publishers withdrew more than 120 generated papers that had made it into real proceedings. A scientific bullshit generator turns out to be a test of peer review more than a prank.

Seb Pearce built his after a long run of Deepak Chopra debate videos, and labelled the button "Reionize electrons". It has a cousin in Wisdom of Chopra, which assembled its sentences from words pulled out of Chopra's own posts. Lines from both ended up in the psychology research on pseudo-profound writing.

Arty Bollocks writes the artist statement that every painter dreads. The Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator, run by Ruderal, serves verb-adjective-noun combinations to planners and apologises to dack.com in its own source. Ask any trade what it says instead of what it means and somebody has already built the button: composers, sociologists, management consultants, art critics. The vocabulary changes, the trick never does.

Buzzword bingo is older than most of the people playing it. Tom Davis wrote the first cards in 1993 at Silicon Graphics, a colleague put a web version up the same year, and a Dilbert strip in February 1994 took it from an office rumour to a global pastime. Three years later students at MIT reportedly filled cards from a graduation speech by Al Gore and shouted bingo at him mid-sentence.

1. Switch to corporate mode and set the length to a full statement.
2. Generate four or five of them and copy the results into a document.
3. Pull out 24 words or short phrases that your own leadership actually says.
4. Lay them into a 5 by 5 grid with a free square in the middle.
5. Agree the rule for the win: a cough, a raised eyebrow, nobody shouts.

The anthropologist David Graeber wrote an essay in 2013 asking whether a lot of paid work is pointless, and got so many letters agreeing with him that it turned into the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs. A YouGov survey of British workers found 37 per cent said their job made no meaningful contribution to the world, with another 13 per cent unsure. Title inflation is part of the same story, and it is easy to imitate: take one adjective and one noun from a generated corporate line, add a role word, and you have Senior Frictionless Touchpoint Partner. The tech mode gives you the company to put it on.

Lorem ipsum tells you a paragraph is the right length but nothing about whether it reads well. A generated mission statement fills the same space in a wireframe or a slide template while sounding exactly like the copy that will eventually replace it, which is either useful or a warning about the copy. Designers have used the older generators this way for twenty years.

Put one generated sentence next to one real sentence from a real annual report and ask a room to pick the fake. The room usually splits, argues, and then starts reading the annual report properly for the first time. That exercise does more for a writing class than a list of rules, and it is the honest reason a site about spotting bad language keeps a machine that produces it.