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StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction
arxiv.orgAs AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space focuses on identifying surface-level signatures of AI writing, we ask instead whether AI-generated stories can be distinguished from human ones without relying on stylistic signals, focusing on discourse-level narrative choices such as character agency and chronological discontinuity. We propose StoryScope, a pipeline that automatically induces a fine-grained, interpretable feature space of discourse-level narrative features across 10 dimensions. We apply StoryScope to a parallel corpus of 10,272 writing prompts, each written by a human author and five LLMs, yielding 61,608 stories, each ~5,000 words, and 304 extracted features per story. Narrative features alone achieve 93.2% macro-F1 for human vs. AI detection and 68.4% macro-F1 for six-way authorship attribution, retaining over 97% of the performance of models that include stylistic cues. A compact set of 30 core narrative features captures much of this signal: AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist' choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity. Per-model fingerprint features enable six-way attribution: for example, Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.
Abstract page for arXiv paper 2604.03136: StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction
this is just spherical cow fallacy combined with purity culture slop
no methodology is perfect, it just needs to be practically valid, using ai != killing people for using ai
unless you are for killing people who use AI, which wouldn’t surprise me one bit about Anti-AI horde
Tell that to the student who gets expelled because they’re writing was falsely identified as AI and then takes their own life.
Tell that to the person falsely identified with facial recognition and is arrested and loses their job.
Using AI to detect AI is as bad as using AI for any important decision.
This isn’t hypothetical. It happens. People will lose their livelihood or die because of it. 7 in 100 is not accurate enough when any penalty is applied to detection.
The key is for the detector to be the screener, innocent until proven guilty, and a screener tool with 7% failure rate is not proof.
Back when I was in Uni poor grades were considered a lifelong sentence to poverty…
To be fair it still is. It’s even worse if your expelled and have to pay back the loan any ways.
As I just wrote elsewhere - that “lifelong sentence to poverty” was, largely, a misconception of the world held by children who haven’t experienced how things actually work in larger society - only listened to what the academic keepers of paper titles have told them. Ivan Illich isn’t far wrong: https://rmst202.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2022/04/illich_deschooling-society.pdf