Denmark’s ex-Prime Minister has really gotten into weblogging! I was going to just quote some of his latest post, which is of course written in Danish, but I think for the benefit of mankind I’ll translate it into English instead:

I’ve been weblogging for a couple of weeks, now. My brief time as a “blogger” has opened a whole new world for me. One almost becomes “a bit addicted”. Around the globe people are sitting and writing weblogs, sharing their thoughts and everyday experiences with all those of us who are interested. Each in their individual way contributes to a description of life in a globalised world. Fascinating!

And I’m still a beginner. My weblog doesn’t have any smart functions – yet. I’ve become addicted to this communication form, and I’m nearly ready to take the next step. Soon you’ll be able to add comments to my weblog. As I go along I’ll also link to other weblogs I find interesting. And this will please experienced bloggers: my weblog will soon have a so-called rss-feed, so it will be easier to keep track of my scribbling. (16/4/03)

For some reason the thought of a staid old politician experiencing such familiar exhileration with a new medium strikes me as amazingly – cute. Loveable. I’m not sure that’s how politicians actually want to be seen, but there you go.


Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

2 thoughts on “enthusiasm

  1. Anonymous

    Actually, politicians are usually very cute and lovable, especially up close and personal. That is why people elect them. An sour, antagonistic politician is an instant failure.

  2. christian

    It’s just the way I felt when I started blogging. Can U blame him? It’s great!! An EXprimeminister blogging, how cool isn’t that?

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

AI STORIES

AI-generated stories have longer endings than human stories

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 […]

How to peer review a paper in 2026

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 […]

“So what if it was ChatGPT? It *could* have been true!”

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 […]

AI STORIES

AI shimmer and sparkle

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 […]

Don’t do a systematic review if you’re in the humanities

This paper is a great example of why you probably shouldn’t use a systematic literature review for a theoretical and conceptual research question like “How does artificial intelligence affect the perception of authenticity and aura in art?” However, if you’re looking for an annotated list of 48 recent articles about […]