Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen
Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen
I’m friends with Eirik, Eirik has shaken hands with the Norwegian Prime Minister, and the Norwegian Prime Minister has shaken hands with both Clinton and Bush. I’m just three degrees away from the president of the United States! Oh, if only I could harness that power!
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I’ve been reading through my blog posts on September 11, 2001 and the days that followed. The things that stand out to me – in addition to the horror of the attack itself – are how massively we (or at least I) used the web to understand what was happening, […]
My colleague Jessica Witte has just shared a preprint where she compared the emotional arcs of the stories we generated using gpt-4o-mini to those of human-authored (pre-2022) stories from the subreddit r/WritingPrompts, conveniently gathered in this dataset. She found a distinct difference in the endings of the LLM-generated stories: both […]
Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist, wrote a useful list of what reviewers need to look out now that so many papers are bad science that looks good thanks to LLMs. Read her whole blog post, she explains it well, but here’s a brief version because I’m pretty sure we’ll be needing […]
I recently read a good article on the different kinds of truth a language model operates with by Luke Mann, Liam Magee and Vanicka Arora, Truth Machines: Synthesizing Veracity in AI Language Models, but despite its lovely typology of truths (consensus, correspondence, coherence and pragmatic) it doesn’t help me with […]
I have this hunch that sparkles and glow and shimmer are somehow a point in the latent spaces of LLMs that have more connections than you would expect. Perhaps their connotation to magic and to the unknown matches some of the mystique of genAI? Or perhaps these words are used […]
This LLM-generated paper demonstrates how LLMs fail to cite core scholarship on a topic but generate misaligned citations systematically.
Eirik
On a more sombre note, my father once shook hands with former Norwegian prime minister Einar Gerhardsen. In his youth, Gerhardsen was a delegate at a conference in Moscow, where he met both Lenin and Stalin. Through another relative, I’m just two degrees of separation from Hitler. Also, I once met PÂl Steigan, former leader of the Maoist party of Norway, famous (or notorius, rather?) in Norway for having met both Pol Pot and Chairman Mao. So, Jill, do you still want to shake my hand the next time we meet? 😉
Jill
Eirik, I had no idea you were such a central node in scary networks! Perhaps I’ll just disregard the whole degrees of separation thing….
chuck
There was a point in the 1970s when my mom had shaken hands with every living president. Of course, this group included Rihcard Nixon, so I’m not sure whether that’s a mark of distinction or not.
Eirik
Wow, that’s quite impressive, isn’t it? I mean, in Norway there are few people and little in the way of distance (here in Oslo, quite literally) between the rulers and the ruled. Which is why I know a number of people from different walks of life who have met our current Prime Minister, not to mention the previous ones. As for security, there actually is very little. Apart from a handful of government ministers and royals, you’re quite likely to bump into top politicians at your local corner store here in the capital. I do it all the time. 🙂
chuck
It helped that there were only three living presidents (LBJ, Ford, and Nixon) and that we lived in Washington, DC. But I’ll admit it’s unusual. I was *very* impressed when I was a kid (but it also seemed perfectly natural that politicians would intersect with regular folks like my mom).
Norman
In Australia, there was one society woman who was quite well known to have slept with every Australian Prime Minister between 1949 and 1965. She had also slept with the Prime Minister of 1940, and one of the best known Wardens of the Cinque Ports in Britain. It’s just a matter of having the right connections.
Jill
So you can become a collector of handshakes or sexual encounters, really, can’t you. Intangible collectibles, I like that 🙂
Norman
I have a confession Jill. Dame Patty was the woman, and all the office bearers I mentioned, were the same person. Sir Robert’s days in power lasted quite a while.
Jill
So that’s what Mum was saying on the phone that I didn’t quite understand but was too distracted to ask about.. I obviously have gaping holes in my knowledge of Australian history 😉 thanks for giving away the joke!