Conferences and seminars

NarrAItion: Symposium on AI and narrative


Bilde
A snowy landscape with icy cliffs and towering mountains. Several explorers are shown climbing and navigating the snowy terrain, some using ropes to bridge gaps. Below the cliffs, a grid of blue electric circuits and transmission towers dot the mountains, blending the natural and technological elements of the scene. The sky is a vividly toxic green, with a orange sun glowing in the background.
Hanna Barakat & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN Photo: Hanna Barakat

One day symposium at CDN in collaboration with colleagues from Berkeley.

This one-day symposium allows participants and guests to share current research on narrative and LLMs. The project team will also have internal meetings 2-3 June to workshop entries for the Living Glossary of Digital Narrative (external link), and develop the project further. 

09:00-09:30: Preamble

  • Berkeley/Bergen meet-and-greet - coffee and buns at CDN (Langes gate 1-3)
  • Walk over Sydneshaugen Skole where the main symposium will be held (Sydnesplassen 9)

09:30-09:45: Welcome

(Auditorium D - ground floor, Sydneshaugen Skole)

  • Welcome to UiB and intro to the NarrAItion project by co-PIs Hanna-Riikka Roine, Jill Walker Rettberg and Hannes Bajohr

09:45-10:30: Hannes Bajohr 

  • Hannes Bajohr: Worlds in LLMs and the Novel 

10:30-10:45 Break

10:45-12:00: Wolfgang Hottner, Hanna-Riikka Roine, Scott Rettberg

  • Wolfgang Hottner: Closings and endings in AI-generated stories
  • Hanna-Riikka Roine: “YES! YES! I absolutely love this insight!” Affirmative Narration as Interactional Strategy in Dialogues with LLM Chatbots
  • Scott Rettberg: Considering Generative AI Narrative as a Dialogic Genre: the Human Function in AI-driven Multimodal Storytelling

12:00-13:15 Lunch for speakers and invited guests

13:15-14:30: Gabriele de Seta, Roberto Simanowski, AI STORIES team

  • Gabriele de Seta: Temperature as creativity
  • Roberto Simanowski (FU Berlin): AI as Author; or, The new message of the medium
  • AI STORIES team: Speed run of the AI STORIES project: how LLMs tell stories

14:30-15:00: Break

15:00-15:45 Daniella Gáti: AI's anti-queer knowledge project

In this talk, Daniella presents their book project in progress, which examines how AI algorithms across the spectrum of generative, classification, recommendation and prediction models create a new, but not entirely unfamiliar knowledge project whose principles and ways of working are profoundly anti-queer. Drawing on queer epistemology, Daniella identifies three main avenues through which AI builds anti-queer knowledges: categories, automating away scientific hesitation/reflection, and speaking for (if not necessarily about) objects of knowledge. Ultimately, the AI episteme is an imperial and instrumentalizing one, which serves a larger extractivist project of domination.

Afternoon free 

19:00-21:00 Dinner at Soya restaurant for speakers and invited guests

NarrAItion: Bridging Humanities and AI 

A collaborative project between UiB and Berkeley, funded by the Peder Sather Center. It is led by Hanna-Riikka Roine and Jill Walker Rettberg at the University of Bergen, and Nina Begus and Hannes Bajohr at Berkeley University. 

About the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN)

CDN is a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence funded by the Norwegian Research Council from 2023-2033. CDN focuses on algorithmic narrativity, new environments and materialities, and shifting cultural contexts. We will investigate how the interactions of human authors with non-human agents result in new narrative forms, how the materiality of digital narratives has changed, and how cultural contexts are reshaping the use and function of digital narrative. 

CDN hosts approximately 40 funded and affiliated researchers and regularly hosts international guest researchers at all career stages.