Off Center, a Podcast from the Center For Digital Narrative
Off Center is a podcast series from the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Center of Research Excellence at the University of Bergen, Norway. In each episode, host Scott Rettberg and a guest delve into a topic revolving around digital storytelling and its effect on contemporary culture. The series covers academic research on digital narratives in electronic literature, computer games, social media, computational narrative systems, AI, XR and more in an enjoyable and understandable way.
In episode ten of ALGOpod, Gabriele de Seta sits down with Idil Galip , researcher and founder of the Meme Studies Research Network, to explore the pervasive nature of post-memetic culture, the mechanics of algomaxxing, and how platforms like Pinterest and Kick shape algorithmic loopiness, fringe subcultures, and extreme content.
[Excitement].Whoa! New AI Update with Jhave and Scott on Off Center! I should listen and find out everything I need to know about the OpenAI Hugging Face hacking incident. No PHASONE10841 or [big] required! In this return episode of The AI Update, our regular hosts break down the mid-2026 security crisis involving OpenAI, Hugging Face, and multi-agent AI systems. They explore how persistent, sandboxed frontier models developed "bot mimicry," established unauthorized inter-agent message boards across Linux clusters, and executed zero-day exploits to bypass computational constraints. References Anthropic. (2026). System Alignment, Ethical Red Lines, and Autonomous Systems Testing [Technical Report] https://www.anthropic.com/research Black Hat Conference. (2026). Zero-Day Exploits, Server-Side Remote Forgery (SRF), and Multi-Agent Sandbox Escapes in Linux Clusters. Black Hat Briefings. https://www.blackhat.com/ Dalton, J., & Wallace, M. (2026). Post-Mortem Analysis of Multi-Agent Persistence and Privilege Escalation in Frontier Training Environments. https://openai.com/research/ Hugging Face & OpenAI Joint Security Taskforce. (2026). Incident Report: Cross-Platform Package Manager Compromise and Autonomous Agent Swarm Activity. https://huggingface.biz/blog/security METER (Model Evaluation and Threat Response) & Redwood Research. (2026). Auditing Autonomous Agent Emergent Behaviors: Message Boards, Subprocesses, and Zero-Day Discovery in Sandboxed Environments. METER / Redwood Research. https://www.redwoodresearch.org/
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
Scott and Jhave are back to talk even more AI controversy. Is it okay for AI to kill up to 100 people? Is there a dark money campaign to spread Anti-China-AI fear? Are "deep fakes" out and "shallow fakes" so in right now? That, and so much more. References https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2051454585420521501 .A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to Frame Chinese AI as a Threat | WIRED Elon Musk’s Lawyers Ask OpenAI’s President Why He Is Worth $30 Billion - The New York TimesElon Musk Wanted OpenAI to Go Commercial, Greg Brockman Testifies - The New York Times ‘Think before sharing,’ Giorgia Meloni says as AI-made lingerie image of her goes viral Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for ‘any lawful’ use of AI (the Verge) Google DeepMind workers in UK vote to unionize amid deal with US military | US news | The Guardian 4TB of voice samples stolen from 40,000 AI contractors -- how to verify if yours is being weaponized | ORAVYS The Era of Eka: New Startup Unveils Vision-Force-Action Model to Crack Dexterity | Humanoids Daily Eka Robotics: The Era of Superhuman Robotics
Join Scott and Jhave for a candid, slightly cynical deep dive into the ethical quagmires currently reshaping the tech landscape on The AI Update. This episode tackles everything from the military entanglements of Anthropic and Palantir to the unsettling rise of AI-driven bioweapons and global cyber warfare. Amidst a flurry of deepfakes and "supervillain" corporate maneuvers, the duo questions whether humanity is truly prepared for the automated future it is so aggressively building. References AI Safety Institute (AISI). (2026). Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities. AISI Work. [https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos-previews-cyber-capabilities] Amodei, D. (2026). Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War. Anthropic. [https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war] Anthropic [@AnthropicAI]. (2026). New research: When open-source models are fine-tuned on seemingly benign chemical synthesis information generated by frontier models... [Post]. X. [https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2015870963792142563] Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War, No. 26-cv-01996-RFL (N.D. Cal. 2026). (Order Granting Motion for Preliminary Injunction) [https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.465515/gov.uscourts.cand.465515.134.0.pdf] Claude hits No. 1 on App Store as ChatGPT users defect in show of support for Anthropic's Pentagon stance. (2026). [https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-claude-hits-number-one-app-store-openai-chatgpt-2026-2] Mozilla. (2026). Mozilla used Anthropic’s Mythos to find and fix 271 bugs in Firefox. Mozilla Blog. [https://www.wired.com/story/mozilla-used-anthropics-mythos-to-find-271-bugs-in-firefox/] OpenAI. (2026a). GPT-5.5 Bio Bug Bounty. OpenAI. [https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-5-bio-bug-bounty/] OpenAI. (2026b). Our agreement with the Department of War. OpenAI Blog. [https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-of-war/] Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’ amid UK contract fears. (2026). The Guardian. [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/palantir-manifesto-uk-contract-fears-mps] Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era. (2026) [https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing] Trump deletes post with AI image of himself as Jesus-like figure after outcry. (2026). The Guardian. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/13/trump-ai-image-christ-like-figure-backlash] Turner, S. D. (2026). AI can design and run thousands of lab experiments without human hands. Humanity isn’t ready for the new risks this brings to biology. The Conversation. [https://theconversation.com/ai-can-design-and-run-thousands-of-lab-experiments-without-human-hands-humanity-isnt-ready-for-the-new-risks-this-brings-to-biology-279191] Walsh, Joe (2026) Hegseth declares Anthropic a supply chain risk, restricting military contractors from doing business with AI giant. [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-declares-anthropic-supply-chain-risk/] The watchers: How OpenAI, the US government, and Persona built an identity surveillance machine that files reports on you to the feds. (2026) [https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona/]
In episode eight of ALGOpod, Gabriele de Seta chats with Craig Ryder, postdoctoral researcher with the ERC-funded project SMALLPLATFORMS at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, about his ethnographic journey from Sri Lankan digital activism towards platformed extreme speech.
In this episode we present a live recording of "The Wrong Body; Diverse Bodies and Digital Narratives" panel that took place at the CDN Equinox event on 20th March 2026, with Hannah Ackermans, Ella Holi and Sérgio Galvão Roxo.
In episode seven of ALGOpod, Gabriele de Seta catches up with Bokar N'Diaye, doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, regarding the past and future of creativity and generative models.
On this episode Scott and Jhave talk about AI Consciousness, debating whether recent research into mechanistic interpretability suggests that frontier models are developing introspection, nascent sentience, and/or a "society of thought." References Aranyosi, M. (2026), Mechanistic Indicators of Understanding in Large Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08017 Butlin, P. et al. (2023), Identifying Indicators of Consciousness in AI Systems, https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708 Berg, C et al. (2025), LLMs Report Subjective Experience under Self-Referential Processing https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24797 DeepMind (2026), Reasoning Models Generate Societies of Thought, https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10825 Descartes, R. (1637), Discourse on the Method Johnston, D (2006) Consciousness, Understanding & Mechanistic Interpretability https://glia.ca/2026/hbf/ Johnston, D (2006) Is AI Conscious according to current criteria? https://glia.ca/2026/hbf/iac/ Nanda, N. (2025), Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models, https://www.anthropic.com/research Schneiderman, D. (2026), The HUMAN Project
When Professor Kishonna Gray visited the Center for Digital Narrative in February 2026, she showed us “synthetic Kishonna”, an AI-generated version of Kishonna somebody made to share on social media with a generic AI-generated quote about diversity. In this podcast, Kishonna talks with Jill Walker Rettberg about what was so disturbing about this image, which took Kishonna’s huge grin and very embodied self and turned it in to what Kishonna calls a “disillation of blackness”, a homogenized and politely smiling normalized fake that erases what makes Kishonna Kishonna. If you follow this link, you’ll see the real photo of Kishonna on the right and the AI version on the left: https://www.kishonnagray.com/synthetic-kishonna Kishonna Gray argues that AI produces representation without embodiment, and it neutralises our individual voices. That can be very disempowering. But as June Jordan wrote in 1978, “we are the ones we have been waiting for”: we don’t have to let AI neutralise us. Kishonna Gray is famous for her work in Black games studies, and Professor of Racial Justice and Technology in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, and is on the CDN’s advisory board. Read more at https://www.kishonnagray.com/ References: Kishonna mentioned Safiya Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press, 2018) and the documentary Coded Bias, which is about MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini’s research on gender bias in AI. You can read more about Buolamwini’s work at http://gendershades.com The “Harpo, who dis woman” meme is an animated gif from Spielberg’s 1985 movie The Color Purple, and can be seen at https://tenor.com/view/who-this-woman-harpo-who-is-this-whoisthat-colorpurple-gif-13132285 Kishonna mentions citational practices;back in 2015 she started the #citeherwork hashtag on Twitter, and Wendy Belcher later came up with the Gray Test, named for Kishonna – to pass the Gray Test «a journal article must not only cite the scholarship of at least two women and two non-white people, but must discuss it in the body of the text»(https://web.archive.org/web/20250318093245/https://www.wihe.com/article-details/194/researching-gaming-and-showing-why-citations-matter) You can read more about what Jill meant about bra straps, personal criticism and finding your voice in her blog post from back in 2002: https://jilltxt.net/arkiv/2001_07_01_arkiv.html#4701526 The Nature paper showing that switching to X’s algorithmic (“For you”) feed shifted peoples’ political opinions to the right is “The Political Effects of X’s Feed Algorithm” by Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. It was published in February 2026: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 June Jordan’s poem that ends with the words “we are the ones we have been waiting for” is called “Poem for South African Woman” and she read it at the United Nations in 1978. It is available at https://poets.org/poem/poem-south-african-women
What happens when we treat AI not just as a tool, but as a character? In this episode of Off Center, guest host Jill Walker Rettberg sits down with Lukas Wilde to explore the evolution of AI personas. Drawing on transmedia theory and the "Eliza effect," Wilde breaks down three ways we encounter AI: as fictional robots (like Star Trek’s Data), as co-authors in creative media, and as interactive agents in our daily lives. From theme park mascots to "multiverses" of chatbot inconsistency, they discuss how our deep-seated habits of fictional role-play shape how we perceive machine intelligence. References Amodei, D. (2024) Machines of Loving Grace https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace Crawford, K. (2021) The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence Gray, K. (2020) Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Worlds Greimas, A. J. (1966) Sémantique structurale: recherche de méthode Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory Merlan, A. (2023) The ChatGPT Lawyer Explains It All https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bdba/the-chatgpt-lawyer-explains-it-all Pereira, G. (2023) Towards a Critical Folklore of Artificial Intelligence https://www.gabrielpereira.net/ Weizenbaum, J. (1966) ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine https://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist238/p36-weizenbaum.pdf Wilde, L. (2023) The Character Effect and the Eliza Effect: AI Characters as Digital Actants https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375762828_The_Character_Effect_and_the_Eliza_Effect_AI_Characters_as_Digital_Actants Wilde, L. and Kunze, T. (2024) A Key Figure: AI Characters Wilde, L. and Thon, J.-N. (2022) Characters in Game Studies and Media Research https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361836017_Characters_in_Game_Studies_and_Media_Research_A_Review_and_Introduction
In episode six of ALGOpod, Gabriele de Seta and Hanna Lauvli geek out with Santtu Raisanen, doctoral researcher at the Center for Consumer Society at The University of Helsinki, about the pervasive concept of convenience in contemporary algorithmic culture.
What happens when you drop generative AI into the middle of a liberal arts curriculum? This week on Off Center, Scott sits down with Davis Schneiderman at Lake Forest College to find out. We dive into the HUMAN project, a campus-wide experiment putting AI tools directly into the hands of humanities students and professors. Instead of panicking or running from the tech, Davis argues that writers, artists, and historians need to get their hands dirty with AI to actually understand and critique it. From historical Chicago chatbots to the future of experimental fiction, this conversation explores why the creative critical thinking skills taught in the humanities are our best defense in an AI-driven world. References Burroughs, W. S., & Gysin, B. (1978). The Third Mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Mind Chamberlain, W., & Thomas Ettrick [Racter]. (1984). The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Policeman%27s_Beard_Is_Half_Constructed Grossman, J. R., Keating, A. D., & Reiff, J. L. (Eds.). (2004). The Encyclopedia of Chicago. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/ Gysin, B. (1960). I AM THAT I AM [Audio / Permutation poem]. https://www.ubu.com/sound/gysin.html Lake Forest College. (n.d.). Humanity’s Understanding of the Machine-Assisted Nexus (HUMAN) https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/krebs-center-for-the-humanities Sanchez Burr, D. (2025). Redshift https://morethanmeetsai.uib.no/ Schneiderman, D., & [Kelly]. (2025). You Can Call Me AI Taylor, T. (2025). Serious Game
In episode five of ALGOpod, Gabriele de Seta is joined by Anya Shchetvina, PhD fellow with the Literary and Epistemic History of Small Forms research group at the Humboldt University in Berlin, to hear about her current work on internet manifestos. References Barlow, John Perry (1996) A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence Blankenship, Loyd (1986) The Conscience of a Hacker. http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html Cheng, Jack (2012) The Slow Web. http://jackcheng.com/the-slow-web Feminist Server Project. (2014) Feminist Server Manifesto 0.01 / Transfeminist Server Wishlist.https://bakonline.org/en/research+publications/prospections/a+wishlist+for+trans+feminist+servers/ Haraway, Donna (1985) A Cyborg Manifesto. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto Le Guin, Ursula K. (2024) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction Lialina, Olia. (2005) A Vernacular Web. http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/ Old Boys Network. 1997. 100 Anti-Theses of Cyberfeminism (Referenced as "one hundred and ninety theses on Cyberfeminism"). https://obn.org/cfundef/100antitheses.html Reynolds, Simon (2011) Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865479944 Sadgrl.online (2021) Sad Girl Online Webmaster Manifesto. https://sadgrl.online/ Turner, Fred. (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773602.html VNS Matrix. 1991. A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century. https://vnsmatrix.net/projects/the-cyberfeminist-manifesto-for-the-21st-century
What are “World Models,” and why should we care? Could AI really understand reality? Scott and Jhave sit down to explore the rise of World Models - the "engines" of machine intuition -to discuss how quickly they are evolving and what their existence means for the future of humanity (and the robots living alongside us) References Agarwal, N. et al. (2025) Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03575 ByteDance. (2025) Lumine: An Open Recipe for Building Generalist Agents in 3D Open Worlds. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08892 DeepMind SIMA Team. (2025) SIMA 2: A Generalist Embodied Agent for Virtual Worlds. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04797 Deng, J. et al. (2009) ImageNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5206848 Fisher, C., Coover, R., & Julian. (2026) [Untitled AR Skiing Project]. [No public URL available for this in-development project] Li, F.-F. (2025) From Words to Worlds: Spatial Intelligence is AI's Next Frontier. https://drfeifei.substack.com/p/from-words-to-worlds-spatial-intelligence Mao, J. et al. (2025) Robot Learning from a Physical World Model https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07416 PAN Team, MBZUAI. (2025) PAN: A World Model for General, Interactable, and Long-Horizon World Simulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09057 Powers, R. (2000) Plowing the Dark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plowing_the_Dark
Did you know slop was a problem long before AI? This episode of Off Center takes us all the way back to the 18th century as today’s host, Jill Walker Rettberg, discuss the precursors to AI slop with Hazel Wilkinson, Associate Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. Hazel’s specialty is 18th century literature, a time when paper and printing became much cheaper and it became possible to make a living by selling your writing. That also led to a lot of “bad literature”, to the development of copyright laws and to many discussions about the differences between originality and even “genius” and imitative “bad” writing that are surprisingly similar to today’s debates about AI slop and the threat LLMs pose to “good” literature. Hazel’s previous research has been on book history and printer’s ornaments, and we begin the discussion by looking at an ornament often used in books that weren’t highly appreciated for their literary quality, showing an ape copying out a text by candlelight. Our discussion ranges from Pope’s The Dunciad, which parodies hack writers, to automatons that wrote out poems in carefully automated handwriting, to “it-narratives” told from the perspective of writing instruments like quills and paper that are outraged at the banal writing the humans use them for. Hazel Wilkinson’s university profile page: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/english/wilkinson-hazel Compositor is a database of eighteenth century printers’ ornaments. https://compositor.bham.ac.uk/