Off Center

Hosted by Off Center, a Podcast from the Center For Digital Narrative

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Jun 2026

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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.

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June 2, 202634 min

The AI Update XXIII - The Pope / Chatting with Claude

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-lavenderFuture 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.v29i4.13636Isomorphic 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-roundKurzweil, 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

May 11, 202621 min

The AI Update XXII - Controversy Part 2

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.Referenceshttps://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 | ORAVYSThe Era of Eka: New Startup Unveils Vision-Force-Action Model to Crack Dexterity | Humanoids DailyEka Robotics: The Era of Superhuman Robotics

April 27, 202622 min

The AI Update XXI - Controversy Part 1

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/]

April 20, 202649 min

ALGOpod #8: Craig Ryder

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.

April 14, 202653 min

Episode 46: "The Wrong Body; Diverse Bodies and Digital Narratives" Live Panel with Hannah Ackermans, Ella Holi and Sérgio Galvão Roxo

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.

April 6, 20261 hr 4 min

ALGOpod #7: Bokar N'Diaye

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.

March 31, 202633 min

The AI Update XX - AI Consciousness

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/2308.08708Berg, C et al. (2025), LLMs Report Subjective Experience under Self-Referential Processing https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24797DeepMind (2026), Reasoning Models Generate Societies of Thought, https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10825Descartes, R. (1637), Discourse on the MethodJohnston, 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/researchSchneiderman, D. (2026), The HUMAN Project

March 24, 202633 min

Episode 45 - Don’t Let AI Neutralize Your Voice with Kishonna Gray

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

March 16, 202640 min

Episode 44: AI Characters with Lukas Wilde

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

March 9, 202644 min

ALGOpod #6: Santtu Raisanen

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.