da Lovelace translated an Italian engineer's French account of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine into English and added notes of her own, lettered A to G, longer than the article itself. They appeared in Scientific Memoirs in 1843. The notes contain the best-known early statement of what a general-purpose machine could do with symbols other than numbers, and the best-known early limit on what it could do at all. (Lovelace, 1843)

the document

In Note A she imagines the engine acting on any objects whose relations can be expressed in its notation, and gives music as her example:

“the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”
— Ada Lovelace, Note A, Scientific Memoirs 3, 1843 (Wikisource)

In Note G, after working through how the engine would compute the Bernoulli numbers, she draws the line:

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”
— Ada Lovelace, Note G, Scientific Memoirs 3, 1843 (Wikisource)

what it says

The two passages are often set against each other, as if she both predicted machine composition and denied it. They are consistent. Note A says the engine could produce music if someone had expressed the rules of harmony in a form it could follow. Note G says the origin of anything it produced would lie in the orders it was given. The first is a claim about range; the second is a claim about authorship. She credits the person who writes the orders.

what is contested

Whether a program that learns its "orders" from data still only does "whatever we know how to order it to perform". Nobody writes out the rules a modern image model follows; its makers set up a training procedure and a very large collection of examples. One reading says Lovelace's line therefore no longer applies. Another says it applies more than ever, with the origin moved from the programmer to the many people whose work became the examples. That second reading is the argument in the reading room on machine-made art.

methodological critiques

Lovelace was describing a machine that was never built, and her notes are a design argument, not a report of behaviour. "Originate" is not defined, and later readers have filled it with whatever they meant by creativity. The notes should be read as a careful statement of a principle about authorship, not as a prediction tested against machines she never saw.

later reception

In 1950 Alan Turing gave the line its modern name, "Lady Lovelace's objection", and answered it: machines surprise their makers often, and a mind that can learn might originate in any sense a person does. See the archive page on Turing 1950 and the imitation game. The objection is now the first thing most people say on meeting a generated picture, usually without knowing whose words they are using.

in the tour: a wing planned for the tour, called "Who made this?", will have a room called “Note G” ···

References

1. Lovelace (1843). Notes by the Translator (Notes A to G), to L. F. Menabrea, Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage. Scientific Memoirs 3. London: Richard and John E. Taylor. Transcribed at Wikisource. en.wikisource.org/wiki/Scientific_Memoirs/3/Sketch_of_the_Analytical_Engine_invented_by_Charles_Babbage,_Esq./Notes_by_the_Translator

see also