Off Center

Recorded live at from the AI tent at Arendal, Wednesday, 12 August 2026.
Scott Rettberg hosts a live panel from Arendalsuka featuring Center for Digital Narrative researchers Zahra Rizvi, Hanna Lauvli and Jason Nelson. The panel explores how generative AI is reshaping narrative practices, ranging from sensor-driven digital art and "AI slop" meme culture to intimate relationships with AI companions on Reddit. Together, they debate the tensions between de-skilling and democratization, the geopolitical and climate costs of big tech, and how creators are critically pushing back against algorithmic homogenization.

AI Boyfriends as New Romantic Texts – Zahra Rizvi
Algorithmic intimacy and the pursuit of romantic companionship are creating new narratives and creative possibilities. This research provides insight into the Reddit discussion forum AI Boyfriends, and the stories that emerge where romance meets AI.
Millions of data points become a story – Jason Nelson
Imagine turning tens of millions of data points into an ever-changing story. Intelligent systems can turn what was previously near impossible into new forms of digital storytelling.
The Artist’s Negotiation with AI – Hanna Lauvli
In the art world, artists express fear and doubt about the vast amounts of stolen data that AI is built on, how it will affect their job market, and the very basis of what creativity is. This research looks at how content creators and artists negotiate their own relationships with generative AI online.
References
Arendalsuka. (2025). Arendalsuka: The Annual Norwegian Political and Civic Gathering. Arendal, Norway.
https://www.arendalsuka.no/

Ghibli, S. (2025). Studio Ghibli Generative AI Trends and Meme Politics. Center for Digital Narrative / AI Stories Project.
https://www.uib.no/en/cdn/aistories
Marx, L. U., & Small File Media Festival. (2020). Deceleration, Environmental Costs, and Low-Carbon Digital Media. Small File Media Festival.
https://smallfile.ca/
NORA (Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Network). (2024). AI Tent at Arendalsuka: Public Discourse on AI and Society. NORA.
https://www.nora.ai/
Reddit Community. (2023–present). r/MyBoyfriendIsAI: Community Discussions on AI Companionship and Relationship Narrative Tropes. Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/
Rizvi, Z., & AI Stories Team. (2024). European Research Council (ERC) AI Stories Project: Narrative Archetypes and LLMs. Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen.
https://www.uib.no/en/cdn/aistories

Host Scott Rettberg speaks with Aarhus University Associate Professor Christian Ulrik Andersen about autonomous AI imaging and his co-authored book, Objects of Interest and Necessity. They examine how fringe user communities, micro-models, and platforms like Civitai, AI Horde, and Hugging Face challenge big-tech dominance in generative AI. The conversation also delves into "minor tech" strategies, alternative infrastructures, and the role of digital art in rethinking our political and cultural relationship to technology.

References
Andersen, C. U., & Cox, G. (2017). The Metainterface: The Art ofPlatforms Cities and Clouds. MIT Press.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038133/the-metainterface/
Andersen,C. U., Milev, N., & Velasco, P. (2024). Objects of Interest and Necessity:A Tour Guide to Autonomous AI Imaging. Digital Aesthetics Research Center /Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI).
https://darc.au.dk/publications/darc-books
Deleuze,G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (D. Polan, Trans.).University of Minnesota Press.
https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816615155/kafka/
LAION(Large-scale AI Open Network). (2021). Open-Source Datasets and MachineLearning Infrastructure. LAION.
https://laion.ai/
Marx,L. U.(2020). The Small File Media Festival. Simon Fraser University Schoolfor the Contemporary Arts.
https://smallfile.ca/
Pamuk,O. (2012). TheMuseum of Innocence. Vintage Books.
https://www.orhanpamuk.net/book.aspx?id=96&lng=eng
Rombach, R., Blattmann, A., Lorenz, D., Esser, P.,& Ommer, B. (2022). High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models. Proceedings of the IEEE/CVFConference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 10684–10695.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10752

ALGOpod is back, and in episode 9 Gabriele de Seta welcomes Alexandra Deem, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, to discuss her ethnography of tradwives and other platformed gender roles, as well as her ongoing research on AI influencers and post-authentic storytelling.

Scott sits down with Aarhus University researcher Malthe Stavning Erslev to explore the aesthetics of generative AI, electronic literature, and "bot mimicry." They discuss how humans imitate algorithms, trace the evolution of neural networks from RNNs to BERT and GPT models, and examine how creative interactions can push back against the homogenization of modern language models. 

References

Devlin, J., Chang, M. W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2018). BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

Erslev, M. S. (2023). Bot Mimicry & Literary AI: On the Aesthetics of Human-Algorithmic Interactions. https://darc.au.dk/blog/nyhed/artikel/new-book-bot-mimicry-in-digital-literary-culture

McCarthy, J., Minsky, M. L., Rochester, N., & Shannon, C. E. (1955). A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/dartmouth/dartmouth.pdf

Patti, K. (2018). I forced a bot to watch over 1000 hours of Olive Garden commercials and then asked it to write an Olive Garden commercial of its own. https://x.com/KeatonPatti/status/1006961202998726665?lang=en 

Pold, S. B., Veel, K., Erslev, M. S., & Ørum, K. (2025–2028). Human-AI Collaboration: Imaginaries, Interventions, Interfaces (HAIC-III) https://darc.au.dk/projects/human-ai-collaboration-haic-iii

Reddit Community. (2015–present). r/TotallyNotRobots: A Subreddit for Totally Normal Human Encounters. https://www.reddit.com/r/totallynotrobots/

Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention Is All You Need. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

On this episode, Jhave and Scott tackle the intersection of artificial intelligence, theology, and human dignity, sparked by Pope Leo XIV's landmark AI encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. From philosophical debates over the "TESCREAL" ideology and Isomorphic Labs' massive $2.1 billion funding and how to navigate mundane office politics using AI ethics, which Scott tires himself with a real time conversation with Claude.
References Davies, H., McKernan, B., & Sabbagh, D. (2024, April 3). ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-lavender

Future of Life Institute. (2023, March 22). Pause giant AI experiments: An open letter. https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/

Gebru, T., & Torres, É. P. (2024). The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence. First Monday, 29(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636

Isomorphic Labs. (2026, May 13). Isomorphic Labs announces $2.1 Billion in Series B funding. https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/articles/isomorphic-labs-announces-series-b-investment-round

Kurzweil, R. (1999). The age of spiritual machines: When computers exceed human intelligence. Viking Press.

Pope Leo XIV. (2026, May 25). Magnifica humanitas [Encyclical letter]. The Holy See. https://www.vatican.va