AI colophon

MishMash studies creative uses of AI, and uses AI openly in making this website.

Where AI contributes

  • Content. AI assistance is used for drafting and adapting texts, including the reading-level variants on adaptive pages and entries in the glossary. Human editors review and revise, often in multiple iterations with machine edits.
  • Code and automation. Much of the site’s tooling, including the sync scripts that pull data from NVA, ORCID, Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wikidata, the theme switcher, the adaptive-content machinery and the quality checks, is developed with AI assistance. It is clearly visible in the repository’s commit history through Co-Authored-By trailers.
  • Translation. Machine translation is used between English and Norwegian (both bokmål and nynorsk), and is marked as such on the pages concerned.
  • Artwork. The bubble variation below is redrawn every night by a small script: a deterministic sketch seeded by the date and the day’s site activity (each small bubble is an upcoming event). It is generative in the algorithmic sense, with no AI model involved. Generated images on this site carry the IPTC digital source type in their metadata (algorithmicMedia for script-drawn images, trainedAlgorithmicMedia for anything an AI model makes), with the creator, the licence and a link to the terms, and the build checks that the marker is there.
Today's generated variation of the MishMash bubble emblem

Today's bubbles, generated nightly from site activity

Our commitments

  1. Humans are responsible. AI output is generally reviewed before it goes live. The exception is the nightly builds, retrieving new data from NVA and ORCID. In any case, errors are ours, not the machines’.
  2. Nothing is hidden. AI involvement is declared, marked on translated pages, and traceable in the open commit history.
  3. Our use of AI is part of our research. Building our own communication channels with AI-based assistance is part of MishMash’s research practice. It is a way to create, explore, and reflect on the tools we study. What we learn feeds back into the centre’s research and teaching.

The weight of the site

Sustainability is a key concern for MishMash. By building our own website, we have full control of how it is rendered and served. During each deployment, the build weighs a set of pages in a headless browser with an empty cache and estimates the carbon per visit using the Sustainable Web Design model as implemented in CO2.js. The full report is at /data/page-weight.json.

One way of saving bandwidth is to compress images and serve them progressively when needed. Another is to cut the web fonts down to the characters the site actually uses. The whole site is written with about 300 different characters, while a general Latin font file carries thousands of glyphs, so the font files shrink by roughly half and a first visit to the front page loads 85 kB of fonts instead of 198 kB.

The Nynorsk experiment

The Nynorsk edition of the site (the pages under /nn/) is generated automatically: every Bokmål page is translated at build time with the rule-based, open-source Apertium engine (nob–nno, moderate norm), the same engine the Norwegian press agency NPK and NRK use for Nynorsk. Every generated page is marked with a notice at the top and links back to its Bokmål original. A hand-corrected page under site/nn/ in the source always wins over the generated one.

We publish the edition knowing it contains errors but also as a way to raise awareness of the limitations of current models and help improve them. MishMash wants to test things in the open, expose problems, and fix them, in our own systems and in the underlying ones. If you spot a mistake, use “Suggest a change” in the footer and we fix the tooling or the page.

The latest changes

Every change to this site is logged in the open. Here are the 5 most recent, with a note on how each was made. So far 1600 changes have been made. AI assistance, from a variety of tools and agents, has been part of the work since the very first one; 524 of the changes also carry an explicit AI-assistance marker, but early changes were not systematically marked, so that number is a lower bound.

  • 1 October 2026 The Nynorsk glossary marks its newest rule as one for the public translation service made with AI assistance
  • 1 October 2026 The code of conduct asks for agreed terms when sharing, agreement with living communities on heritage, and consent for contributed material made with AI assistance
  • 1 October 2026 Update directory and results from NVA. automatic update
  • 1 October 2026 Stretchtext toggles drop the native button look and are one line tall, so they no longer break lines on Apple devices made with AI assistance
  • 1 October 2026 The Nynorsk glossary follows the new code of conduct text made with AI assistance

All changes, back to the very first, are in the open change log on GitHub.

More about the thinking behind the site: the web philosophy in the project wiki and the centre’s communication strategy. Questions or concerns: contact@mishmash.no.