Floating Motif

In AI-generated text, a narrative unit that is detached from its expected context and turns up in strange places in a given text
Anne Sigrid Refsum 2026-09-18
DOI: 10.64773/fa4f-a2ab

Explication

In literary studies, a motif is “a situation, incident, idea, image, or character-type” found in many types of literary works, and comparable to archetypes, topoi or stock characters (Baldick 215–16). References to motifs are made in analyses of most art forms, such as in visual art, meaning a “recurring fragment, theme or pattern” (Tate); or in music, where the term refers to “a short musical idea, (…) most commonly regarded as the shortest subdivision of a theme or phrase that still maintains its identity as an idea” (Drabkin). Film audiences will have experienced the use of Leitmotifs, a term and compositional technique first used by Richard Wagner, where musical motifs are linked to specific characters, places, events, or narrative themes in a film (cf. Whitall). While definitions of what constitutes a motif can be broad and general, a motif will be recognisable to an audience member well-versed in a genre, distinguishable from other motifs, and there will be patterns of repetition creating meaning within the work in question. 

In folkloric texts such as folktales or ballads, the term motif will specifically refer to a minimal narrative unit that together with other narrative units make up a story. Folklorist Stith Thompson (1946) defines motif as “the smallest element in a tale having power to persist in tradition. In order to have this power, it must have something striking about it” (415). Folklorist Ronald Grambo points out how the etymological root for motif is the Latin motus, which means movement, hence referring to “a narrative element that furthers the action” (251ff). This is usually some form of event, such as the Devil being employed as a midwife, or a miraculous spring bursting forth for a holy person (Thompson Motif-Index 1293, 1205). When, in Beauty and the Beast, Belle’s love and loyalty cause the curse that has turned the Beast into an animal to be lifted, allowing him to return to his life as a prince, this is an example of one such narrative motif, one that has been used in innumerable stories and tales across the globe. 

The term floating motif has been used by, among others, scholars of ancient epics and Biblical studies (cf. Currie; Aaron) in reference to the movement of a narrative motif between genres, stories, and contexts. The usage of this term for AI-generated text is inspired by N. Katherine Hayles’ term, flickering signifiers. Hayles writes, “carrying the instabilities implicit in Lacanian floating signifiers one step further, information technologies create what I will call flickering signifiers, characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations and dispersions” (76). Such “unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions” are frequently features of AI-generated texts, especially texts where the so-called hallucination is present. These tendencies may, among other processes, be due to floating motifs. Refsum (2025) has shown how floating motifs occur when prompting Large Language Model based text generators (LLMs) to tell familiar stories. Through generating new synthetic variants of a Norwegian folktale, Refsum finds that in some cases, LLMs will introduce narrative motifs that are foreign, i. e. not to be found in any collected or published version, to the folktale the prompt asks for. Distinguishing floating motifs in a text means that parts of an LLM’s reasoning become evident to the reader. Connections between the prompted folktale and other tales or texts appear to occur somewhere in the generative computational process performed by the LLM before presenting the output, in what is called the latent space (cf. de Seta).

An example of a floating motif is found here: a prompt asking for a Norwegian version of the folktale ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ (‘Kjæresten i skogen’/‘The Sweetheart in the Forest’), a folktale with a female protagonist, will cause LLMs to include motifs of transformation from human to animal or of the protagonist breaking a ban and thereby losing their romantic partner. Neither of these are motifs present in variants of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’, and thus not present in this context in the training data. However, these are motifs found in other famous Norwegian folktales with a female protagonist, and in famous fairy tales such as the one adapted into the film Beauty and the Beast. These motifs have, then, been floating through the latent space of the LLM, which has made the connection between various Norwegian tales with a female protagonist.

See Also

• AI Hallucination - Phenomenon where an AI model—usually an AI chatbot powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) or computer vision programs—produce a confident but factually inaccurate or nonsensical responses or perceives objects and patterns that do not exist
• Algorithmic Narrativity - The combination of the human ability to understand experience through narrative with the power of the computer to process and generate data that results in the development, modification, and distribution of narratives
• Archetype - A recurring or recognizable narrative pattern – figure, image, motif, or plot, such as the hero, the great mother, the descent into the underworld, or the rags-to-riches tale – whose repetition across cultures and periods has been taken as evidence of a universal psychic structure, a shared literary grammar, or an act of abstraction that produces the similarity it claims to find
• Intertextuality - Relationship between texts, where a text references, alludes to, or is influenced by another text, enriching the reader's understanding and interpretation
• Story Generation - Thread of work in computing to automatically generate narratives, sometimes for research purposes and sometimes for artistic and creative ones

Works Referenced

Aaron, David. Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue. T&T Clark, 2006.  

Baldick, Chris. Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Third Edition. Oxford University Press, 2008.  

Currie, Bruno. “Etana in Greece.” Gods and Mortals in Early Greek and Near Eastern Mythology, edited by Adrian Kelly and Christopher Metcalf. Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 126–144.  

Drabkin, William. “Motif.” Grove Music Online. 2001. Oxford University Press. Accessed 15 Jul. 2026, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.19221. 

Grambo, Ronald. “The Conceptions of Variant and Motif: A Theoretical Approach.” Fabula, vol. 17, no. 3, 1976, p. 243, https://doi.org/10.1515/fabl.1976.17.1.243. 

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers.” October, vol. 66, 1993, pp. 69–91, https://doi.org/10.2307/778755. 

Refsum, Anne Sigrid. “‘The Sweetheart in the Forest’ and the Synthetic Storytellers.” Humanities, vol. 14, no. 12, December 2025, p. 230, https://doi.org/10.3390/h14120230. 

de Seta, Gabriele. “Synthetic Probes: A Qualitative Experiment in Latent Space Exploration.” Sociologica, vol. 18, no. 2, January 2024, pp. 9–23, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/19512. 

Tate. “Motif”. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/motif. Accessed 15 July 2026. 

Thompson, Stith. The Folktale. New York, 1946. https://archive.org/details/folktale00thom. Accessed 28 May 2026. 

---. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends. Bloomington, 1955–1958. Compiled by Robert Bedrosian. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/Thompson2016MotifIndex. Accessed 28 May 2026. 

Whittall, Arnold. “Leitmotif.” Grove Music Online. 2001. Oxford University Press. Accessed 15 Jul. 2026, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.16360.

Further Reading

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass. Routledge. http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sign-play.html. 

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to a Science of Mythology: 1: The Raw and the Cooked_. Penguin, 1986. 

Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale, translated by Laurence Scott. University of Texas Press, 2015.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International