Modeling Fair Play in Detective Stories with Language Models
This work addresses storytelling quality in AI-generated detective fiction, but it is incremental as it applies existing probabilistic methods to a new domain.
The authors tackled the problem of modeling fair play in detective stories using a probabilistic framework to define and measure it, finding that LLM-generated stories often fail to balance surprise and coherence, leading to poor quality.
Effective storytelling relies on a delicate balance between meeting the reader's prior expectations and introducing unexpected developments. In the domain of detective fiction, this tension is known as fair play, which includes the implicit agreement between the writer and the reader as to the range of possible resolutions the mystery story may have. In this work, we present a probabilistic framework for detective fiction that allows us to define desired qualities. Using this framework, we formally define fair play and design appropriate metrics for it. Stemming from these definitions is an inherent tension between the coherence of the story, which measures how much it ``makes sense'', and the surprise it induces. We validate the framework by applying it to LLM-generated detective stories. This domain is appealing since we have an abundance of data, we can sample from the distribution generating the story, and the story-writing capabilities of LLMs are interesting in their own right. Results show that while LLM-generated stories may be unpredictable, they generally fail to balance the trade-off between surprise and fair play, which greatly contributes to their poor quality.