arXiv Machine Learning

If These Walls Could Talk: Critical Play with Large Language Models in Museums

arXiv:2606. 15565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in museums to as role playing chatbots which let visitors talk to simulated versions of people and artefacts from the past.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Sanyu Studio: A Multi-Agent System for Art-Historical Narrative Construction

Sanyu Studio is a multi‑agent dialogue system that treats 321 Sanyu oil paintings as agents equipped with fact, interpretation, organization, and memory‑filtering mechanisms. The paper reports on a seven‑day workshop with eight art‑university participants, showing that user prompts, evidence organization, and cognitive tendencies produced divergent yet coherent digital narratives of Sanyu. The study suggests that, when historical evidence is limited, AI can amplify human agency and provide public audiences with an interactive entry point into art‑historical interpretation.

By Zhaoxi Wei, Hongye Yang, Shuyuan Tian
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 10

The Living Library: Transforming Archival Collections into Conversational Knowledge Systems -- Lessons from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library

The Living Library is an end‑to‑end framework that converts fragmented digital archives into governed, conversational exhibit experiences. Developed at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, it digitizes a 300,000‑record collection, enriches it with OCR and metadata, and publishes it to a hybrid dense/semantic index. The system supports curator review via the Archivist App, powers a researcher interface, and runs Talk to TR—a museum exhibit where a digital human embodiment of Theodore Roosevelt answers visitors’ questions using Cross‑Era Analogical Grounding and dual‑path retrieval to keep responses grounded and responsive.

By Pengce Wang, Lucia Ronchi Darre, Matt Briney, Michaell Bakalars, Dan Rutkowski, Ursula Hardy, David Wolf, Laura Hoffman, Allen Kim, Shawn Wright, Juan Lavista Ferres
arXiv AI
Aug 28

The BS-meter: Detecting Politics and Labour through ChatGPT's Language

The paper investigates the linguistic characteristics of ChatGPT-generated text, comparing it to 1,000 scientific publications and exploring its relation to concepts of ‘bullshit’ in political speech and workplace contexts. By applying hypothesis‑testing methods, the authors demonstrate that a statistical model of bullshit can link the artificial bullshit produced by ChatGPT to the political and workplace functions of bullshit observed in natural human language.

By Alessandro Trevisan, Harry Giddens, Sarah Dillon, Alan F. Blackwell
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

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.

By Cody Kommers, Sarah G Immel, Drew Hemment, Mina Lee
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

PERSONAWEAVER: Controllable Diversity Beyond Conventional Archetypes in Procedural Character Generation

PERSONAWEAVER is a new approach to procedural character generation that separates world building from behavioral specification, using manually curated banks of moral positions and conversational reactions to diversify character behavior. By applying this method across ten realistic and fantastical settings and three large language models, the system produces broader moral and interactional response distributions, varied interpersonal language, response length, sentiment, and less archetypal world attribute combinations compared to prior work.

By Maan Qraitem, Kate Saenko, Bryan A. Plummer
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