How do references to place and landscape constitute 'Norwegianness' in folktales? Part of the ERC project AI STORIES, this paper explores and compares nature and culture in Norwegian traditional folktales and in LLM generated 'Norwegian' folktale-like narratives.
Paper long abstract
What makes a folktale 'Norwegian'? How do references to place and landscape constitute 'Norwegianness' in folktales, and how does this question shed light on aspects of Large Language Models (LLMs), the most widespread new text generating technology today? In this paper I present a project where I go back to the basics of folktale studies in order to examine the structures of 'Norwegian' narratives generated by LLMs. Through new and comparative approaches to traditional collected folktales as well as generated folktales, I aim to renew the understanding of Norwegianness in the traditional material as well as in the new.
This paper is part of the ERC project AI STORIES. Narrative Archetypes in Artificial Intelligence, where we seek to understand the underlying narrative structures of LLMs.