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Abstract

What happens when you ask a large language model mostly trained on American training data to generate Australian stories? This talk uses recent developments in literary analysis of generative AI to analyse the homogeneity of AI-generated stories, with examples from a dataset of stories generated for each of 236 different nationalities. Almost all the generated stories share the same basic plot structure: a protagonist lives in or returns home to a small town and resolves a minor conflict by reconnecting with tradition and organising community events. A sprinkling of national flavour or stereotype is added – in the Australian stories the small town tends to be a mining town in the outback, the Norwegian towns are by the fjords – but the nostalgia, the lack of change and the absence of strong conflict or romance is constant across nationalities. We already know about AI bias: if you write “the doctor folded” the suggested next word is more likely to be “his”, and if you write “the nurse folded” it’ll probably be “her”. What if there is also a deeper bias, shaping narrative structure and not just the surface level of words? As generative AI is integrated into more and more of our writing tools, it is likely to nudge us into writing in particular ways. What happens if our computers nudge us to tell stories that are closer to Hollywood or Hallmark templates than to the stories of our own cultural contexts?

Bio

Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture and Co-Director of the , a Centre for Research Excellence at the University of Bergen in Norway. Jill also leads the project , is funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. Starting from a postgraduate degree in comparative literature, Jill has researched hypertext fiction, digital art, narrative blogs, selfies, machine vision and most recently, AI-generated stories. Jill’s most recent book is  (Polity Press 2023), which is available both in print and as an open access e-book. She is a citizen of both Australia and Norway, and lived in Perth before moving to Bergen as a child.