LLMs

Screenshot of a paragraph from a New York Times article published May 12, 2026. Text reads: "The price of tomatoes -tart bursts of flavor in salads and sandwiches — surged nearly 40 percent in April from a year ago on a combination of bad weather, high tariffs and climbing transportation costs."

Genre glitches and unexpected promotional phrases as a sign of AI writing

A genre glitch is a characteristic of LLM-assisted writing where the text suddenly switches genre, typically inserting a short promotional phrase full of sensory details into an informational text. Genre glitches occur when a word in the generated text is heavily associated […]

Photo of a billboard ad at Oslo S train station showing a smiliing conductor and the text "Du må ikke sove. Joda, bare sov du."

AI STORIES

“Du må ikke sove”: a floating motif detached from its meaning (or: LLMs can write Norwegian but miss cultural references)

There’s a new ad for the train between Stavanger and Oslo in Norway that uses a line from Arnulf Øverland’s famous anti-fascist poem Du må ikke sove (“You must not sleep”). Du må ikke sove, you must not sleep, the ad says. […]

A diagram showing an LLM trained on training data, where it learns that a poem is the average of texts that are described as poems - this is NORMALISATION. The right half of the diagram shows a fine tuned model that has been told by a human than a rhyming couplet looks like a poem. This finetuned model has learnt that a poem rhymes. It generates a poem based on statistical analysis of human workers' reception of the texts it has previously generated as poems. This relates to sycophancy in chatbots - they aim to please.

AI and algorithmic culture

Do LLMs normalise or idealise? Notes after discussing Ryan Heuser’s “Generative Aesthetics”

A summary of yesterday’s Critical AI Theory Reading Group discussion of Ryan Heuser’s article about LLM-generated poetry, with a discussion of whether LLMs normalise or idealise their training data.

AI and algorithmic culture

What knowledge workers use LLMs for

I gave a talk about AI today for a group of knowledge workers in the public sector – people who are asked to write reports summarising research on a specific topic, and who coordinate funding schemes and advise on policy – and […]

Search Here ….

Tags

Jill Walker Rettberg

Genre glitches and unexpected promotional phrases as a sign of AI writing

“Du må ikke sove”: a floating motif detached from its meaning (or: LLMs can write Norwegian but miss cultural references)

Do LLMs normalise or idealise? Notes after discussing Ryan Heuser’s “Generative Aesthetics”

What knowledge workers use LLMs for