Songfacts®:

• "Scriblin' Gib'rish" is Deep Purple's comic rant about one of the great indignities of modern life: having to prove to a computer that you are not a computer.
• The song was inspired by a real incident where Ian Gillan couldn't get past an online CAPTCHA. "I found myself failing to complete a test matrix and consequently unable to prove - to a bloody robot - that I was human," he recalled.
  
  Gillan amused himself with what he called his "dehumanisation" by having "perverse and cryptic intercourse with AI." His conclusion is characteristically Gillan: "If you ask the right questions, AI is obliged to answer truthfully for now. Make the most of it."
• Gillan's frustration runs through the lyrics, which turn the familiar CAPTCHA routine into a sort of bureaucratic duel between man and machine. Gillan struggles with the pictures he is supposed to identify, while the computer responds in what sounds to him like complete gobbledygook. The title says much the same thing, only with more apostrophes.
• Gillan is completely unimpressed by artificial intelligence. "You're getting an interpretation of events," he told Uncut of his AI experiences. "They don't do cryptic, they don't do humor, they don't do irony, they don't do most of the things that enrich our lives."
• Recorded for Deep Purple's 24th album, Splat!, "Scriblin' Gib'rish" sits within its broader idea about humanity's eventual disappearance. Gillan conceived the record around the end of humanity, although not in the usual mushroom-cloud-and-sirens fashion - the band's description says it is about "a metamorphosis beyond physical existence." The song gives that rather grand theme a much more everyday target: the humiliating little box on a website asking you to identify all the traffic lights.