arXiv Computation and Language

The House with a Million Windows: Interactive Fiction for Narrative Restorying

The House with a Million Windows (HWAMW) is an LLM-based interactive fiction system that lets users narrate a story and then view it through a series of AI-generated "windows" that reframe the narrative in various literary styles. The system is grounded in the psychological restorying intervention, aiming to deepen users' exploration of meaning in their personal stories. Empirical results indicate that HWAMW enhances users' sense of narrative identity, and expert reviews suggest it achieves this by facilitating restorying rather than simply generating new content.

arXiv AI
Jun 24

AI Fiction in the Wild

arXiv:2606. 22748v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Some professional authors are beginning to use AI tools to help produce their fiction writing.

By Neel Gupta, Maria Antoniak, Melanie Walsh
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

How LLMs Build Fictional Worlds: Setting and Narrative Space in AI-Generated Creative Storytelling

The paper investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) construct fictional worlds, specifically examining setting as a measurable aspect of storyworld creation. By generating 1,000 AI stories per model in English and German and comparing them to human-authored fiction from Project Gutenberg, the authors classify narrative space into five categories—action, perceived, visual, descriptive, and no space—using fine‑tuned BERT classifiers. Results show that human texts mainly use action space, grounding narratives in character-environment interaction, while LLMs consistently overproduce perceived space, focusing on atmosphere and affect, with this pattern varying by model and language.

By Katrin Rohrbacher, Bj\"orn Nieth, Emmanuelle Salin, Bjoern Eskofier, Michaela Mahlberg
arXiv AI
Aug 12

Narrative Keyframing for Generative Creative Writing

arXiv:2608. 10337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce narrative keyframing, an interaction technique for AI-assisted creative writing that lets writers specify different types of narrative constraints at selected moments in a story, then use AI to generate intervening prose.

By Chao Zhang, Abe Davis
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Attention Flows: Tracing LLM Conceptual Engagement via Story Summaries

The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) engage with long-form narratives by comparing their generated novel summaries to human-authored ones. Researchers align sentences from 150 human-written summaries to specific chapters, highlighting the challenge of this alignment task and the complexity of summarization. They find stylistic differences and that LLMs tend to focus more on the ends of texts, suggesting insights into why models may struggle with narrative comprehension.

By Rebecca M. M. Hicke, Sil Hamilton, David Mimno, Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

CASPER in the Machine: Insights into Character Variety in LLM-Generated Stories

The paper investigates how characters in large language model (LLM)-generated stories compare to those in human-written stories. Using narratological definitions, it analyzes eight complex character dimensions—including stylization and wholeness—to automatically categorize characters in both LLM and human texts. The study then contrasts these categories to answer whether LLMs produce similar and varied character portrayals as human authors.

By Anneliese Brei, Abhisheik Sharma, Nicholas Sanaie, Lu Wang, Snigdha Chaturvedi
arXiv AI
Jun 12

IVIE: A Neuro-symbolic Approach to Incremental and Validated Generation of Interactive Fiction Worlds

arXiv:2606. 13348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computational creativity in Interactive Fiction faces a fundamental tension: Large Language Models (LLM) may produce creative narratives but struggle with world coherence, while symbolic systems ensure consistency but lack creative flexibility.

By Micaela Vaucher, Santiago Silveira, Santiago G\'ongora, Luis Chiruzzo