After we finished our collaborative Oulipo poem game two weeks ago, we concluded that many of these constraints did not lead to "literature." What we created was "concept art" in which the process and the input was the art, not the output (I forgot who mentioned this in class).

Can we have constrained randomly generated text that is also literature?

The Postmodern Essay Generator would say yes. Created by Andrew C. Bulhawk, he used a programming tool called a Dada Engine which randomly generates numerous essays on postmodernism. Refresh the page and you get a similar yet entirely different essay.

Unlike the Oulipo works, the essays actually make grammatical sense and do sound very academic. The website even links to an article in which NYU Physics Professor Alan Sokal tricked a cultural criticism publication in printing one of his fake articles.

Upon closer inspection, the essays actually do not say anything, and they try to cloud this fact using big words.

I see this essay generator to be somewhere in the middle between the Oulipo's idea of having all combinations and Calvino's essay that says computers will solve constraints to produce one solution. This generator produces more than one essay, but it follows certain rules.

This generator also relates to the Imitation Game.