> AI has been a field encompassing things far more basic than this for longer than most commenters have been alive.

When I was 13, having just started programming, I picked up a book from a "junk bin" at a book store on Artificial Intelligence. It must have been from the mid-80s if not older.

It had an entire chapter on syllogism[1] and how to implement a program to spit them out based on user input. As I recall it basically amounted to some string exteaction assuming user followed a template and string concatenation to generate the result. I distinctly recall not being impressed about such a trivial thing being part of a book on AI.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism

Eliza was 1960s.

In the 1990s I remember taking my friend's IRC chat history and running it through a Markov model to generate drivel, which was really entertaining.