Stories define people – they shape our relationships, cultures and societies. Unlike other skills which were replaced by technology, storytelling has remained uniquely human and distinguishes humans from machines. But now even the storytelling is being questioned. Artificial intelligence powered by massive data sets can generate stories that sometimes rival and even surpass those written by humans.
Creative professionals were among the many first to feel the specter of AI. Last 12 months, Hollywood screenwriters protested, demanding – and winning – protections against AI replacing their jobs. As university ProfessorsWe've seen student work that appears suspiciously AI-generated, which might be frustrating.
Beyond threatening livelihoods, AI's ability to create compelling, human-like stories also poses a societal risk: the spread of misinformation. Fake news, which previously required considerable effort, can now be produced easily. This is especially concerning because many years of research have shown this to be common in humans more influenced by stories than through explicit arguments and requests.
We wanted to look at how well AI-written stories compare to those of human storytellers. This is what we found AI storytelling is impressive, but Professional writers don’t have anything to fret about – at the very least not yet.
The power of stories
How do stories influence people? Her The power often lies in transportation – the sensation of being transported to an imaginary world and completely immersed in it. You've probably experienced this before whenever you lost yourself within the wizarding world of Harry Potter or nineteenth century English society in Pride and Prejudice. This variety of immersion means that you can experience recent places and understand the perspectives of others, who are sometimes influential the way you see your individual life later.
When you’re swept up in a story, you not only learn by observing, but your skepticism is suspended. You get so caught up within the plot that you just turn into careless and permit the story to influence you without triggering skepticism in it or the sensation of being manipulated.
Given the ability of stories, can AI tell a superb story? This query concerns not only those within the creative industry, but everyone. An excellent story can change lives, as this proves mythical and nationalistic narratives which influenced wars and peace.
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Investigating whether AI can tell compelling stories also helps researchers like us understand what makes narratives effective. Unlike human authors, AI offers a controlled solution to experiment with narrative techniques.
Head-to-head results
We explored it in our experiments whether AI could tell compelling stories. We used descriptions from published studies to prompt ChatGPT to create three narratives after which asked over 2,000 participants to read these stories and rate their engagement with them. We labeled half as AI-written and the opposite half as human-written.
Our results were mixed. Across three experiments, participants found that human-written stories were generally more “engaging” than those generated by AI, no matter source label. However, they were no more prone to raise questions on AI-generated stories. In several cases they even questioned them lower than those written by humans. The only clear result was that a story may very well be described as AI-written made it less attractive to participants and led to more skepticism, regardless of the particular writer.
Why is that? Linguistic evaluation of the stories showed that the stories were generated by AI tended to have longer paragraphs and sentenceswhile human writers showed greater stylistic diversity. AI writes coherently, with strong connections between sentences and concepts, but Human writers vary moremaking a richer experience. This also suggests the chance that encouraging AI models to jot down in additional diverse tones and styles can improve their storytelling.
These results provide a primary glimpse into the potential of AI for storytelling. We also checked out the research in Storytelling, psychology And philosophy to know what makes a superb story.
We imagine 4 things make stories compelling: good writing, credibility, creativity and lived experience. AI is great at writing fluidly and making stories believable. But creativity and real-world experiences are the weak points of AI. Creativity means coming up with recent ideas, while AI is designed to just do that predict the most certainly final result. And while AI can sound human, it lacks the real-world experiences that usually make stories truly compelling.
Get closer?
It continues to be too early to attract a final conclusion about whether AI can ultimately be used for high-quality storytelling. AI is nice at writing fluently and coherently, and its creativity can rival that of average writers. However, the strength of AI lies in its predictability. Its algorithms are designed to generate the most certainly final result based on data, allowing stories to be engaging in a well-known way. This is analogous to the concept of Beauty on averagethe documented preference of individuals for composite images that represent the typical face of a population. This predictability limits true creativity, but it may possibly are still well received by the audience.
Screenwriters and novelists are usually not at risk of losing their jobs in the intervening time. While AI can tell stories, it's not quite on par with the very best human storytellers. Still, as AI advances, we may even see much more compelling stories generated by machines, which could pose a serious challenge, especially in the event that they are used to spread misinformation.
