StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction
arxiv.org
As 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

  • doben@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    And now you‘re trying to impress the empty ether with your irrelevant doodles from back when.

    Just like you keep dwelling on your own trivial creations, you keep lingering in conversations you should’ve put behind you eons ago.

    My humble guess is: the massive gravitational center of any orbit you’ve ever calculated has always been your ego.

    • MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish
      12·
      1 day ago

      I didn’t realize my ‘trivial creations’ required a full thesis review from you.

      Who keeps lingering in conversations they should’ve put behind themselves eons ago?

      If my ego has a gravitational pull, I suggest you stop orbiting it.

      • doben@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        21 hours ago

        Calling a one-liner a thesis after trying to make an argument with long-winded, but ultimately empty autobiographical babble — like an ugly accident one cannot look away from, this just keeps pulling me in.

        So, how does the anecdotal, badly written life story of a self-absorbed ego going through a midlife crisis relate to the reality of people getting their lives fucked through some automated allegation machine? Would you, maybe, condense your point into a simple sentence? So that even irrelevant comets are able to get it and to also showcase your moral blindness towards systemic dangers, just because you managed to get through, back in the good ol’ days. Dangers that, as pointed out already and contrary to you own experience, will have life changing consequences for other people. That’d be great.

        • MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish
          12·
          19 hours ago

          the reality of people getting their lives fucked through some automated allegation machine?

          The reality is: you are fucked with or without the stamp of approval from academia. Get over the ratings game, nobody cares if you got an A+ in Algebra III or a higher than 3.75 GPA. They (that would hire you) usually don’t care about what school you went to except to make football conversation. If one boots you, there are 4000 more out there just as willing to give you another chance.

          Big talk about academic integity has been exactly that for 50+ years: big talk, very little action in reality. If you’re a one in a million victim of terrible application of technology - you’ve got a good chance of winning a fat discrimination lawsuit, if that’s how you want to live your life.

          Would you, maybe, condense your point

          No, but I’ll give you a couple of links to read: let me know what you think AFTER you’ve gotten at least 1/2 way through: https://rmst202.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2022/04/illich_deschooling-society.pdf https://arl.human.cornell.edu/linked docs/Illich_Tools_for_Conviviality.pdf

          • doben@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            9 hours ago

            Thankfully, I am not your pupil. If you’re not able to make an argument without sending people off to read into your own philosophies, you ultimately failed to make an argument.

            You’re’ making a categorical error, as this thread is about an Automaton having direct, tangible real-world consequences for people’s live trajectory. It’s not about the legitimacy of the educational system itself, not about the relevance of grades. If it was, I would probably even agree with you.

            Now, that your initial, ideological take has been rebuked after the very first try, you keep arguing a strawman from a privileged position of survivorship bias, with an outdated anecdote and an absolute refusal to acknowledge differential vulnerability, by reducing your pompous deliberations about systemic rot into individual failure. Effectively a cruel form of victim-blaming disguised as enlightenment. And probably one of the most US-American things to do.

            But what is it now, the failure of the system or of the individual? Because your argument seems to be condemning the system as irredeemably corrupt, yet simultaneously you blame individuals for not transcending it. If the system is so rotten, how can individual failure to escape it be a moral failing? Of course you can’t escape that contradiction without exposing your very own misanthropic disgust for those that didn’t manage.

            You, the irrelevant comet in my orbit, only drift further off into the void now, by distorting the problem of a 7% false-positive rate on a life-altering accusation into a one in a million (0.0001%) chance of terrible application of technology. Mixed with unfounded empirical claims about the material conditions about the labor market in the 21 century and spiteful jabs at potential live choices of the ones falling through the cracks.

            Your attempts to claim authority are merely furthering your illegitimacy as a serious person. You’re dismissed. Off you go, lil’ irrelevant comet.