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When a large language model (LLM) writes Harry Potter fanfiction, it reliably produces fundamental elements of the Hogwarts universe, such as recognizable places and characters. Human-written Harry Potter fanfictions, however, typically include these fundamentals and much more, incorporating stylistically irregular content and relationship-diverse plotlines.
arXiv:2606. 17350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet the question of whether these models are capable of generating diverse outputs remains contested.
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.
The paper introduces VOLM, a framework that quantifies how much original value a human adds to a document beyond what a language model could generate from a task description alone. Unlike existing tools that focus on stylistic detection, VOLM extracts content at varying granularities, reconstructs it with an LLM, and compares these reconstructions to those derived from the task description. Evaluations across news articles, ICLR peer reviews, and argumentative essays show that VOLM can distinguish human-authored texts from LLM-generated ones while remaining robust to content-preserving transformations.
arXiv:2609.34240v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing open-ended generation metrics measure likelihood, lexical diversity, or distributional similarity in generic representation space, y...
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.