Experimental Narratives: A Comparison of Human Crowdsourced Storytelling and AI Storytelling
This work addresses the problem of understanding cultural biases and social dimensions in storytelling for researchers in AI and narratology, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new comparison.
The study compared human and AI storytelling by analyzing 250 human-authored and 80 AI-generated stories in response to prompts about creating and falling in love with an artificial human, finding that AI narratives, especially from GPT-4, were more progressive in gender roles and sexuality but less imaginative than human ones.
The paper proposes a framework that combines behavioral and computational experiments employing fictional prompts as a novel tool for investigating cultural artifacts and social biases in storytelling both by humans and generative AI. The study analyzes 250 stories authored by crowdworkers in June 2019 and 80 stories generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in March 2023 by merging methods from narratology and inferential statistics. Both crowdworkers and large language models responded to identical prompts about creating and falling in love with an artificial human. The proposed experimental paradigm allows a direct and controlled comparison between human and LLM-generated storytelling. Responses to the Pygmalionesque prompts confirm the pervasive presence of the Pygmalion myth in the collective imaginary of both humans and large language models. All solicited narratives present a scientific or technological pursuit. The analysis reveals that narratives from GPT-3.5 and particularly GPT-4 are more progressive in terms of gender roles and sexuality than those written by humans. While AI narratives with default settings and no additional prompting can occasionally provide innovative plot twists, they offer less imaginative scenarios and rhetoric than human-authored texts. The proposed framework argues that fiction can be used as a window into human and AI-based collective imaginary and social dimensions.