“The Sweetheart in the Forest” and the Synthetic Storytellers

What happens to a Norwegian traditional folktale when told by a Large Language Model (LLM)? As machine-generated text becomes increasingly omnipresent, the need to understand such texts through analysis using literary scholarship and seeing them through the lens of folkloristics becomes apparent. For the purposes of examining basic structures of LLM narrative, this article uses the folktale “The Sweetheart in the Forest” (ATU 955) to examine how the style and telling of folktales is adapted by LLMs, including how LLMs display a tendency towards “floating” motifs and imagery, and how the LLMs relate to the cultural specificity of the Norwegian variant.