Freelance interpreters say that the Norwegian government is breaking its own promises about fair working conditions. "We have a right to live like everyone else," says a user of interpretation services.

Written by Maja Mathisen. Photos by Frode Fjerdingstad and Maja Mathisen. Published October 9, 2025, at 5:13 AM.

Bibbi Hagerupsen is Deaf and has low vision. She relies on interpreters to participate in social activities outside of work. She has used interpretation services for 35 years.

"I am a hostage of the NAV^[NAV refers to the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration.] system. Please, dear politicians! The system must be changed. Freelance interpreters need good wages and working conditions. I need to be able to request interpreters without worrying about whether I'll actually get one."

These are the words of 55-year-old Bibbi Hagerupsen in a Facebook post.

Most people can eat dinner with friends or take a hike in the woods without issue, but Hagerupsen, who is Deaf and has low vision, needs an interpreter in order to participate in these sorts of activities. Unfortunately for her, however, freelance interpreters don't desire these sorts of short-duration assignments, due to low pay.^[Footnote from article with own notes: Freelance interpreters have some of the lowest honorarsats in all of Norway, based on pay grade 29. Pay grades refer to the tables of remuneration negotiated by the parties in the workplace [i.e. employer and union]. Pay grade 29 has a gross annual pay of 390,100 NOK (~38,397 USD). Honorarsats refers to pay rates for a generally individual or temporary assignment performed by someone who is not employed by the one paying, and can therefore not receive a proper wage or salary. Honorar is commonly translated as "fee".] This situation has led freelance interpreters and users of their services to now accuse the Norwegian government of social dumping.^[Footnote from article: Social dumping refers to workers who experience worse pay and working conditions than normal for their line of work. Source: Norwegian Union of Municipal and General Employees.]

This accusation comes after the Ministry of Labor and Social Inclusion published an action plan against social dumping and work-related criminality this summer. The ministry's plan was created after NRK published an article in which the Norwegian police stated that they believed that organized criminals from Romania have taken over food delivery services in Oslo.

Feels overlooked

Helge Edland leads the organization Interpreters in the Norwegian Union of University and College Graduates (Tolker i Akademikerforbundet, abbrev. TiA), and is a freelance interpreter for NAV. He lives in Stavanger^[Stavanger is one of Norway's largest cities, with a municipal population of 150,123 (4th) and a metropolitan population of 364,308 (3rd) as of 2025. Stavanger was founded in 1125 AD on the Stavanger peninsula in the middle of Rogaland county in Norway's southwest; the peninsula is surrounded by fjords. Stavanger is home to the headquarters of the NATO Joint Warfare Center as well as Equinor, a state-owned petroleum company desperately trying to reform its image. Equinor is the largest company in the Nordic region and Stavanger is called the Oil Capital of Norway.] but travels to a wide variety of locations across Norway for interpretation assignments. He says that the government's action plan was created based on media coverage and overlooks knowledge workers like himself.

Helge Edland has taken freelance assignments from NAV for more than 20 years as a speech-to-text interpreter for the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing.

—"NAV's interpretation service is doing in practice exactly what the department is trying to fight against. The department has nice words and intentions, but as long as they continue to undermine us and our opportunities to have quality pay and good working conditions, I will continue to have little faith that we the members of TiA will see our situation improve," Edland says, referring to NAV's proposal to put much of the interpretation service out to tender.^[Footnote from article: The proposal is for three quarters of the hours of the interpretation service to be performed by private actors. Source: Norwegian Union of University and College Graduates.] [NAV] presented this proposal as a solution to interpreters' dissatisfaction regarding pay and working conditions.

Hagerupsen agrees with Edland.

—"I have to place my order for an interpreter through NAV's interpretation service well ahead of time in order to keep my hopes up that I will be able to participate in social activities in the sign language community. So I feel trapped in the NAV system, where I don't get to use my right to independence and freedom without worrying about whether or not I'll get an interpreter for the things I want to do. So NAV are themselves doing social dumping," she says.

Hagerupsen needs an interpreter to go to a café; the interpreter doubles as a sighted guide.

Hagerupsen commutes to work from Drammen^[Drammen is the administrative center of Buskerud county. It is the seventh most populous municipality in Norway with 105,800 people as of 2025, and it is located along the Oslo Fjord, southwest of Oslo proper in eastern Norway. Drammen and Oslo are roughly half an hour apart by train; Drammen is on the fringes of Greater Oslo.] to Oslo every day. In her free time she wants to engage in physical activities like swimming or hiking, but she ends up having to stay home because she can't get access to an interpreter.

—"Have to prioritize the assignments"

Deaf, d/Deafblind and hard-of-hearing people's right to an interpreter is guaranteed by § 10-7 of the National Insurance Act (Folketrygdloven), which covers interpretation during interactions with healthcare professionals, in the workplace, in education and in everyday life.

NAV's acting director Tormod Moland says that interpretation in daily life has a lower priority, but that they always try to find an interpreter for every assignment.

—"We have to prioritize the assignments we get: healthcare gets the highest priority, after that important events such as funerals, as well as interpretation for work and education."

NAV employs some 250 interpreters at present, and in 2024 ~69% of interpretation hours were covered by a total of 360 freelance interpreters, according to NAV's director of welfare Nina Tangnæs Grønvold. The Norwegian Association of the Deaf estimates that there are roughly 16,500 users of Norwegian Sign Language.

—"I would absolutely be more isolated without freelance interpreters," Hagerupsen says.

Bibbi Hagerupsen with her interpreter, Monica Glåmen.

—"Applies throughout all workplaces"

NRK has asked Tonje Brenna, who was the Minister of Labor when the action plan was published, about the criticism. The department has answered through state secretary Ingrid Marie Vaag Endrerud.

—"Does the action plan show consideration for freelance interpreters, and if so, how?"

—"We work hard to create safe and quality workplaces for all people. The government's action plan against social dumping and work-related criminality applies throughout all workplaces, including state organs," Endrerud says.

Endrerud says that a new remuneration system^[NO: Honorarmodell; see footnote 2 for an explanation of honorar, and modell is obviously just the word "model".] for freelance interpreters will be implemented come 2026.

—"The new system involves raising the pay rates somewhat, and also paying interpreters for meeting up for an assignment as opposed to only paying for length of time. This will make shorter assignments more lucrative for freelancers and accordingly increase access to sign language interpreters at night."

NRK has asked for more information about the new remuneration system, but has not received an answer yet. NRK also contacted representatives in the Progress and Conservative parties for comment; they told NRK to contact other people in the parties, but those people have not responded, either.

Like an episode of House full of red herrings, twists and turns, we now reach the final act where it turns out that there was one simple thing that the doctor overlooked.

I wrote this in my notes for this project last night.

I installed Nvidia container toolkit [note: I had also already installed Cuda] and ran the docker again, this time remembering to cd first. However, even after changing my GPU driver to nvidia-driver-580-open, [the terminal] still spat out,

Error response from daemon: failed to create task for container: failed to create shim task: OCI runtime create failed: runc create failed: unable to start container process: error during container init: error running prestart hook #0: exit status 1, stdout: , stderr: Auto-detected mode as 'legacy'
 nvidia-container-cli: initialization error: nvml error: driver not loaded: unknown
  Error: failed to start containers: rvc

When I tried starting the docker.

nvidia-smi gave me NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running. — which seems like it implies that there's something wrong with my graphics driver, and that's the thing stopping my docker from running. Oh my fucking God, I wonder if "there's something wrong with my driver" is related to the whole "when I'm on the Nvidia driver, my TV shows a black screen when I plug in the HDMI" thing that led me to use nouveau instead of the Nvidia driver to begin with.

At this point I'm wondering if it'd be easier for me to literally remake RVC in fucking Turbowarp than install it.

It seems like on Linux Mint, problems of this sort are oftentimes the result of Secure Boot, which means that I either have to disable Secure Boot or sign the NVIDIA modules.

Fast forward to this morning.

I tried repeatedly to sign the NVIDIA modules today, but couldn't get it to work: after some effort I managed to set a password for the signing, but then when I actually rebooted I couldn't actually type the password in? That part seemed like it might've just been an issue of a shitty interface that accepts your keystrokes without giving any indication of it, and it using a different keyboard layout than the one I thought it was using, without telling me. Unfortunately, after I failed to confirm the password, the terminal also didn't seem like it would let me set a new password, so then I just threw my hands up and disabled Secure Boot outright. And after I did that, wouldn't you know, nvidia-smi could finally recognize that I actually had an Nvidia GPU, and I could plug in the TV HDMI and have it work, and I could finally get the Docker for RVC to run. A sight for sore eyes!

So that's something I didn't know about: that Secure Boot, Nvidia, and Linux Mint can be kinda stinky with each other. Thankfully it seems like Secure Boot isn't something I really need, at least not for now.

However! Although I can go to http://127.0.0.1:7865/ and be met with the RVC WebUI, I can't actually add my weights (i.e. voices) to the weights folder, and without that I can't really use RVC because the list of voices is just blank. I tried stopping the docker and changing the weights folder's permissions in the terminal, however it doesn't seem like that actually changed anything, but maybe I just did it wrong somehow. Or is this issue to do with the folders being mounted to the docker? What can I do about it?

Edit: Thanks to kleeon I have managed to copy over all the weights using sudo cp, but this still leaves the index files. They aren't showing up in the dropdown; I tried using "Path to the feature index file" instead but it doesn't seem to work. I'm struck by how the format examples are for Windows. Is it like I need to actually copy the files into the Docker container itself?

Edit 2: sudo docker cp ./rvc/Rikkav2.index rvc:/app/logs + "Refresh voice list and index path" has successfully added at least that index file to the dropdown. Guess I'll just have to copy over the rest of the index files with the same method.

Edit 3: I tried using curly brackets {} like I'd used to copy to the weights folders, alas this doesn't seem to work with docker cp, only regular cp, so I had to run docker cp for every single index file I had to copy over. But now I've done it and my dropdown of index files is complete.

Edit 4: I've set up the weights and the index files now, so I think the only problem now is actually plugging in the audio file I want to convert. Is it not working because docker is containerized so it can't access my regular files, is it like RVC is being Windows-centric so it can't understand my file paths, or what?

Edit 5: Thanks to underisk's suggestion, I have successfully converted a test audio recording. WE ARE SO BARACK!!!!!!!

The story thus far by my recollection:

I'm trying to get Retrieval-based Voice Conversion (RVC) — a program for making voice "deepfakes" using audio-to-audio conversion — working on my Linux Mint Xfce machine. To this end, I've had to...

And this isn't to mention how every single step of this process has also had its own hiccups and confusions, as I'm "diving in the deep end" with basically no knowledge of anything I'm doing.

Put simply, it feels like all the forces of the universe are conspiring against me, trying to keep me from installing this one simple program onto my computer.

Compare this to another form of machine learning technology: large language models. Those things are everywhere nowadays! They're practically inescapable! They're in Google and DuckDuckGo. Firefox even on Linux has an LLM feature now. Several mainstream social media apps have them. Windows has its Copilot, phones are getting "AI" features left and right, yadda yadda. And I'm sure you all know everything wrong with the mass adoption of LLMs already.

Put simply, it feels like all the forces of the universe are conspiring against me, trying to make it impossible for me to stay away from this crap I absolutely don't want.

And this raises the question of why, if both of these things are popularly called "AI", do they differ so much in this regard?

The answer to me seems to just be money. RVC has no subscription fee nor gathering of my personal data, certainly not on a privacy-friendly OS; contrarily RVC makes me more private by letting me mask my voice. RVC is also literally incapable of even attempting to influence my opinions or dull my mind; it does not rely on overseas server farms whose water use is leaving surrounding communities without tap water; and I could even swap out RVC's training material if I objected to it. And without these "features", it's basically impossible for anyone to make a profit from RVC. And if it's impossible to make a profit from RVC, then there's no money being put into making this incredibly useful program accessible for laypeople — certainly no money being put into forcing it on people!

And I just think that's some glorpshit.

I found this article a while ago but apparently never shared it here. This article specifically presents basically a form of video deepfake specially designed for the purpose of anonymizing sign language. This includes full-body anonymization as opposed to only anonymizing the face, and having the video generation pay special attention to the face and hands to account for the diverse handshapes, non-manual markers and rapid movements common in signing, that video deepfake models trained on non-SL content tend to struggle with.

I have by this point made about 20 videos using retrieval-based voice conversion (RVC) to anonymize my voice when speaking — audio deepfakes, essentially — and I'd say I'm mostly satisfied with the technology. And while I'm not currently proficient in any sign language, I have still thought from time to time about what I or others might do in order to anonymize sign language in a similar manner. The usefulness of being able to use any language anonymously online should be obvious on a site as privacy-conscious as ours.

Some uses of anonymous signing that this article doesn't mention is if someone, say, wants to make unofficial SL interpretations of movies or shows, but is worried about facing legal repercussions for violating copyright; or in my own case, I'm currently working very slowly on a signed conlang, and want to be able to share my progress on the lang without either deanonymizing myself nor forcing people to learn a new and clunky transcription system.

Amrit Kaur is resigning as leader of the Red Youth following media coverage and criticism of a video [she made] about the murder of the radical right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

Kaur has been under strong pressure to resign from the position after she posted an apparently sarcastic and strongly ironic TikTok video about the murder of the American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, and she has told Subject that she has chosen to resign.

—"To show that I'm taking the situation seriously, I have chosen to resign as leader of the Red Youth. I wish the organization the best, because it has many important battles to fight. That's why I'm resigning," she explains.

She also writes in a Facebook post, "It's the battle for a just world and against imperialism which is the most important. That's why I'm resigning as leader of the Red Youth."

She removed the TikTok video shortly after uploading it and said she regretted it, but the criticism did not end there. The leader of the Red Party, [the Red Youth's parent organization,] Marie Sneve Martinussen, said on Thursday evening that Kaur was not suited as leader of the party's youth wing.

—"The Red Party strongly distances itself from all forms of violence and murder. It is wholly inappropriate to joke about it. Kaur should've never done this," Martinussen said.

Kaur further writes on Facebook, "Neither I nor the Red Youth support the murder of Charlie Kirk nor assassinations in general. [My remarks were] poorly thought through and I understand why people are reacting so strongly. This has ended up impacting the Red Youth as an organization, and its members."

Key points:

• Russia denies that the drones were its own, and says it has no intentions of stoking a war with NATO. Contrarily, Russia says it is Western Europe worsening relations by suggesting Russia is a threat.
• According to Poland, this is the first time Russian missiles or drones have been shot down in Polish airspace, and this is also the greatest number of Russian missiles or drones to enter Polish airspace.
• Poland's prime minister Donald Tusk has invoked article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, but not article 5. NATO does not view the Russian drones as an attack, but an "intentional incursion". So this isn't WW3, yet.
• EU diplomat Kaja Kallas has called on Europeans to "invest in Europe's defence" in response to how "Russia's war is escalating, not ending".
• Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky called the drones "an extremely dangerous precedent for Europe" and has called for a "joint response by [...] Ukraine, Poland, all Europeans, [and] the United States."

I know you're a commie living in the McCarthy era in 2025, but we see you, we hear you, we love you

By Hannah Solstad Klepp. 5:50 PM, September 5, 2025.

[Screencap of what looks like a Seth MacFarlane cartoon, showing subtitles translating back into English as, "In legal terms we call this 'wiener'"]

This character is saying "dick move" which means that something was a bad thing to do. Picture from Disney+.

Since December of 2024, TV watchers have been able to send feedback about the subtitling of different TV shows to teksting.no. Since then, the website has received 277 complaints about bad or missing subtitles. The complaint mechanism is maintained by the Norwegian Association of Audiovisual Translators (Norsk audiovisuell oversetterforening, NAViO).

NAViO's leader, Morten Gottschalk, believes that the worst mistakes show signs of uncritical use of machine translation.

The examples are numerous and somewhat comical. In one example, the English word "plates" was translated as tallerkener, as in a flat dish, when in context the translation should really be bilskilt, as in a license plate. In another example, the name of film director M. Night Shyamalan was rendered as M. Nattshyamalan, using the Norwegian word for "night". Some more examples are "pitcher" in the sense of vannmugge, as in a pitcher of water, being rendered as kastemann, as in a baseball pitcher; and "chick" in the sense of jente, i.e. girl, being rendered as kylling, meaning chicken.

—"I have a hard time believing a human would've made these sorts of mistakes," Gottschalk says.

Gottschalk further explains that NAViO strives to push employers and streaming services to do more to ensure that their subtitles are of good quality.

—"Some of them tell their subtitlers to submit work which only needs to be 'good enough'. We're trying to get a whole industry to take subtitling more seriously."

Here are some more examples of complaints NAViO has received:

• Mistenkelig replaced with mistenksom. Both translate as "suspicious", but mistenkelig in the sense of "arousing suspicion" and mistenksom in the sense of "having suspicions". Picture from TV2.
• "In the ground" (i bakken) misspelled as "up the butt" (i baken), which NAViO says isn't the most serious mistake they've seen. Picture from Viaplay.
• [one I'm not quite sure what's wrong with but VG calls it "an example of meaningless Norwegian". It makes perfect sense to me but I'm assuming the problem is using bygningsvedlikehold, as in the act of maintaining a building, to refer to the crew doing that maintenance. Maybe the right word would be vedlikeholdspersonalet, I dunno.] Picture from HBO Max.
• "I never had the courage to load [this pistol]", using å laste (to load, of a ship) instead of å lade (to load, of a gun). Picture from TV2 Play.

—"Many of the people who send complaints do find humor in the mistakes. Many also ask if there actually was a human in charge when these mistakes happen. Some believe that these mistakes are even grounds to sue," Gottschalk writes in a message to VG.

He underlines that the mistakes can be more than just funny blunders.

[Screencaps of American Dad! on Disney+, showing the subtitles in both English and Norwegian. In English, the subtitles read, "We've failed as parents, even by Appalachian standards." The Norwegian subtitles translated back to English read, "Imagine that. We've failed as parents, even by Indian standards." — specifically Indian in the Turtle Island sense. VG's caption simply says, "Directly translated." — which I find a bit confusing.]

[Screencaps of a live action show on Disney+, showing the subtitles in both English and Norwegian. In English, the subtitles read, "Cool. Where abouts?" The Norwegian subtitles translated back to English read, "Cool. Where in Spain?" VG's caption:] "The story takes place in Australia, and the character is wondering where in the city something's taking place. How "Spain" ended up in the Norwegian subtitles is wholly unknown," NAViO writes.

Racist elements

—"We also see some examples where incorrect translations add inappropriate or somewhat racist elements which aren't found in the original text. The sloppiness disrespects paying viewers in any case," Gottschalk says.

Read also: Disney+ removed Norwegian subtitles: —"Unacceptable"

Gottschalk further describes that the most engaged complainers are those sending complaints about missing subtitles for the hearing impaired, particularly for major sporting events.

[Screencaps of what looks like Family Guy or another Seth MacFarlane cartoon, with subtitles in English and Norwegian. The English subtitles read, "See you, bitch!". The Norwegian subtitles translated back into English read, "Awesome. See you, Chinawoman."]

—"We think it's a problem that viewers get shown bad subtitles on a service that they paid for. Bad or missing subtitles are a problem that especially impact the hearing impaired, and those who lack native-level comprehension of both the original language and Norwegian."

Gottschalk says that complaints were particularly numerous during the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships earlier this year.

—"We got a lot of messages about missing subtitles for the hearing impaired."

Received few complaints

The ski championships were broadcast on NRK and TV2. TV2's press chief Jan-Petter Dahl attests that TV2 subtitled all events manually in real time.

—"Manual real-time subtitling is demanding; real-time subtitling is rarely free of mistakes regardless of if it's a human or a machine doing it. There's both a technical and human delay when doing real-time subtitling. The subtitler must listen, translate, write the text, and the text has to be sent to broadcast," Dahl writes in an e-mail to VG.

Dahl further emphasizes that TV2 did not receive many complaints during the three days they broadcast the ski championships.

—"TV2's experience has been that subtitling mistakes happen at irregular intervals. We're always working to improve on this front because TV2 wants to subtitle as much of our content as possible, as well as possible, for our viewers," he writes.

VG has also contacted the other streaming services which have been used as examples in this article.

• Disney writes, "Thank you for bringing our attention to these incorrect translations. We are working to fix them as quickly as possible."
• Viaplay represented by Madeleine Liereng writes, "We always greatly value feedback on how we can improve and absolutely take any feedback to heart. We are continuously working to quality check all parts of our platform and channels, and will do our best to become even better when it comes to translations and subtitling before it reaches our audience."
• HBO Max represented by Marianne Aambø writes, "We use external providers for subtitles on all four of our TV channels, as well as HBO Max and Discovery+. On Norwegian programs one can personally choose whether one wants to see subtitles. We look into complaints brought to our attention, fix the issues and republish."

10:58 AM, September 6, 2025.

A child was served concentrated dish detergent instead of water at a preschool in Sande, Vestfold county, Norway. The child was later hospitalized.

The preschool has explained that they had confused a jug of water with a jug full of dish detergent, according to Drammens Tidende^[Local newspaper for Drammen, a major city and Oslo suburb near Sande.].

—"When the child was given something to drink, it unfortunately came from a misidentified container of concentrated dish detergent, which was poorly marked, incorrectly placed, and not checked by the person pouring it. No other children were served dish detergent," the preschool writes in a statement to the parents.

The preschool says that the mistake was quickly discovered, and that the child drank no more than one or two sips of the dish detergent. The preschool contacted poison control for advice but did not call 113 [emergency number for ambulances]; it was the child's parents who called 113 when they arrived, and the child was hospitalized.

The newspaper writes that the child was discharged from the hospital after a few days, but is now back at the hospital for further treatment.

Drammens Tidende has contacted the head of the preschool, who directed them to the central offices of {Læringsverkstedet.|lit. "The Learning Workshop"} Læringsverkstedet is a chain of preschools^[One of the largest private preschool chains in Norway, in fact: 236 preschools taking care of ~18,000 children in 2019.].

—"We are first and foremost deeply sorry for what has happened, and we are now focused on caring for the child and family," writes Læringsverkstedet's leader of public relations Ragnar Sagdahl.

The Russian embassy in Norway strongly reacts to Norway's agreement with the UK concerning the purchase of new frigates.

3:53 PM, September 5, 2025.

Norwegian defense minister Tore Sandvik (Labor) and British defense minister John Healey have agreed that Norway will purchase British frigates. The Russian embassy in Norway has publicly criticized this agreement through the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti, according to Forsvarets Forum^[Magazine published by the Norwegian Armed Forces.].

The Russian embassy particularly reacts to remarks from Norwegian defense minister Tore O. Sandvik in an interview with Bloomberg, where he said that the frigates would hunt for Russian submarines.

—"Military actions against Russia carried out by Norway, the UK, or other NATO countries, comprise a threat against the national security of our country; they have a destabilizing effect and increase the risk of escalation [of tensions] in the Arctic region," the Russian embassy says.

The Russian embassy also says that a lack of communication and other actions aimed at building mutual trust between Norway and the Russian Armed Forces are worsening the situation.

—"It considerably increases the risk of dangerous incidents," the embassy writes.

An AI-generated picture shared by Nes municipality was quickly deleted from Facebook, but screencaps of the macabre detail continue to circulate online.

By Renate Karlsmoen, published 9:04 AM, August 29, 2025.

AI BLUNDER: Årnes is the administrative center of Nes municipality. This picture was taken in 2008. © Øystein Søbye, Norske Naturfotografer, Samfoto.

Nes municipality published a Facebook post earlier this week, promoting the recurring "Family & Community" event at the Family House. A picture generated with artificial intelligence (AI) accompanied the text as an illustration.

This was evidently not the best idea.

Nes residents quickly reacted to one detail in the picture: what appeared to be parts of a chopped-up baby on a plate. The municipality quickly deleted the post, but Dagbladet observes that screencaps of the Facebook post are still circulating online.

SPREADING: A number of people have seen this AI-generated image. Screencap courtesy of the anonymous person who informed Dagbladet of this story.

The AI blunder has also received attention on TikTok, where one user in the comments section jokes, "I hope they have something else on the menu."

—"We published a picture late last night, a picture which was generated using artificial intelligence. The picture was supposed to show an inclusive and friendly local community, but one detail in the picture, a doll on a plate, could at first glance be perceived as something completely different. We completely understand and offer our deepest apologies," says Nes municipality's chief of communications Elin Brede Kristiansen to Dagbladet.

Kristiansen says that the post was up for a bit under 12 hours before the municipal government deleted the post.

—"We have good routines for use of pictures, but artificial intelligence is still new to us. This was a case of haste and recklessness leading to a bad outcome, and I take full responsibility for it," she says.

She confirms that the municipality will change its routines going forward.

—"Going forward, all AI-generated pictures will go through an extra quality check before publication, particularly focusing on details that could be misunderstood. We want to use new technologies responsibly."

Nes is not the first Norwegian municipality to cause an AI commotion, however: Earlier this year, Tromsø municipality was criticized for its use of artificial intelligence to help write an important report, which ended up containing a number of mistakes. An AI expert described that situation at the time as "a completely unnecessary embarrassment".