floating motif

Floating motifs are a characteristic of LLM-generated texts that Anne Sigrid Refsum defines as “a motif that appears in an AI-generated story that is out of place or does not serve a function. Floating motifs tend to be tangentially connected to the generated text, as they originate in the training data but have been detached from their original context.”

“Du må ikke sove”: a floating motif detached from its meaning (or: LLMs can write Norwegian but miss cultural references) author website templates 2026