mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?

arXiv 2407.13248 ↗First posted 18 Jul 2024cs.CLcited by 78

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Abstract (arXiv)

This paper investigates the capability of LLMs in storytelling, focusing on narrative development and plot progression. We introduce a novel computational framework to analyze narratives through three discourse-level aspects: i) story arcs, ii) turning points, and iii) affective dimensions, including arousal and valence. By leveraging expert and automatic annotations, we uncover significant discrepancies between the LLM- and human- written stories. While human-written stories are suspenseful, arousing, and diverse in narrative structures, LLM stories are homogeneously positive and lack tension. Next, we measure narrative reasoning skills as a precursor to generative capacities, concluding that most LLMs fall short of human abilities in discourse understanding. Finally, we show that explicit integration of aforementioned discourse features can enhance storytelling, as is demonstrated by over 40% improvement in neural storytelling in terms of diversity, suspense, and arousal.

Key facts. Cited by 78 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 19 of its 65 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2024.

Builds on

19 of 65 references.

References · 19

  1. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
  2. 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 12,865
  3. 2024Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of contextcited by 3,175
  4. 2018Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytellingcited by 232
  5. 2022Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revisioncited by 193
  6. 2023Art or Artifice? Large Language Models and the False Promise of Creativitycited by 168
  7. 2016The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapescited by 69
  8. 2019Movie Plot Analysis via Turning Point Identificationcited by 33
  9. 2021Uncovering Implicit Gender Bias in Narratives through Commonsense Inferencecited by 32
  10. 2023Experimental Narratives: A Comparison of Human Crowdsourced Storytelling and AI Storytellingcited by 26
  11. 2024Predicting vs. Acting: A Trade-off Between World Modeling & Agent Modelingcited by 20
  12. 2022Go Back in Time: Generating Flashbacks in Stories with Event Temporal Promptscited by 15
7 more
  1. 2023Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generationcited by 12
  2. 2024Measuring Psychological Depth in Language Modelscited by 9
  3. 2019Contextual Affective Analysis: A Case Study of People Portrayals in Online #MeToo Storiescited by 7
  4. 2024Unlocking Structure Measuring: Introducing PDD, an Automatic Metric for Positional Discourse Coherencecited by 7
  5. 2017Annotating High-Level Structures of Short Stories and Personal Anecdotescited by 3
  6. 2023Towards a Computational Analysis of Suspense: Detecting Dangerous Situationscited by 3
  7. 2024Returning to the Start: Generating Narratives with Related Endpointscited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 7; 2025: 37; 2026: 34.

78 papers.

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  1. 2025Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scalecited by 163
  2. 2024Can AI writing be salvaged? Mitigating Idiosyncrasies and Improving Human-AI Alignment in the Writing Process through Editscited by 49
  3. 2025LLM Probability Concentration: How Alignment Shrinks the Generative Horizoncited by 26
  4. 2025Creative Preference Optimizationcited by 24
  5. 2024CS4: Measuring the Creativity of Large Language Models Automatically by Controlling the Number of Story-Writing Constraintscited by 22
  6. 2024Evaluating Creative Short Story Generation in Humans and Large Language Modelscited by 21
  7. 2025StoryWriter: A Multi-Agent Framework for Long Story Generationcited by 19
  8. 2025Biased Tales: Cultural and Topic Bias in Generating Children's Storiescited by 15
  9. 2025Teaching Language Models To Gather Information Proactivelycited by 14
  10. 2025QUDsim: Quantifying Discourse Similarities in LLM-Generated Textcited by 13
  11. 2025NarraBench: A Comprehensive Framework for Narrative Benchmarkingcited by 13
  12. 2024Does ChatGPT Have a Poetic Style?cited by 12
38 more
  1. 2025BookWorld: From Novels to Interactive Agent Societies for Creative Story Generationcited by 12
  2. 2025EvalAgent: Discovering Implicit Evaluation Criteria from the Webcited by 11
  3. 2025Conversational User-AI Intervention: A Study on Prompt Rewriting for Improved LLM Response Generationcited by 10
  4. 2025TALES: A Taxonomy and Analysis of Cultural Representations in LLM-generated Storiescited by 10
  5. 2025Towards Enhanced Immersion and Agency for LLM-based Interactive Dramacited by 9
  6. 2026StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fictioncited by 9
  7. 2025Optimizing Diversity and Quality through Base-Aligned Model Collaborationcited by 8
  8. 2025Poor Alignment and Steerability of Large Language Models: Evidence from College Admission Essayscited by 6
  9. 2025Probing and Inducing Combinational Creativity in Vision-Language Modelscited by 6
  10. 2025CML-Bench: A Framework for Evaluating and Enhancing LLM-Powered Movie Scripts Generationcited by 6
  11. 2025Deep Associations, High Creativity: A Simple yet Effective Metric for Evaluating Large Language Modelscited by 6
  12. 2025Token-Driven GammaTune: Adaptive Calibration for Enhanced Speculative Decodingcited by 5
  13. 2025Evaluating the Creativity of LLMs in Persian Literary Text Generationcited by 4
  14. 2026LLMs Exhibit Significantly Lower Uncertainty in Creative Writing Than Professional Writerscited by 4
  15. 2026Narrix: Remixing Narrative Strategies from Examples for Story Writingcited by 4
  16. 2025Narrative Studio: Visual narrative exploration using LLMs and Monte Carlo Tree Searchcited by 3
  17. 2025Societal Impacts Research Requires Benchmarks for Creative Composition Taskscited by 3
  18. 2025Cooking Up Creativity: Enhancing LLM Creativity through Structured Recombinationcited by 3
  19. 2026Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Surveycited by 3
  20. 2024Chain-of-MetaWriting: Linguistic and Textual Analysis of How Small Language Models Write Young Students Textscited by 2
  21. 2025Group Preference Alignment: Customized LLM Response Generation from In-Situ Conversationscited by 2
  22. 2025Taming LLMs with Negative Samples: A Reference-Free Framework to Evaluate Presentation Content with Actionable Feedbackcited by 2
  23. 2025Can LLMs Generate Good Stories? Insights and Challenges from a Narrative Planning Perspectivecited by 2
  24. 2025Plug-and-Play Dramaturge: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach for Iterative Narrative Script Refinement via Collaborative LLM Agentscited by 2
  25. 2025Evaluating LLM Story Generation through Large-scale Network Analysis of Social Structurescited by 2
  26. 2026The AI Fiction Paradoxcited by 2
  27. 2026World-State Transformations for Neuro-symbolic Interactive Storytellingcited by 2
  28. 2026Can LLM Agents Stick to the Script? A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Consistency in Interactive Narrativescited by 2
  29. 2024Detecting Machine-Generated Long-Form Content with Latent-Space Variablescited by 1
  30. 2025GuessBench: Sensemaking Multimodal Creativity in the Wildcited by 1
  31. 2025Literary Evidence Retrieval via Long-Context Language Modelscited by 1
  32. 2025Long Story Generation via Knowledge Graph and Literary Theorycited by 1
  33. 2025Beyond Direct Generation: A Decomposed Approach to Well-Crafted Screenwriting with LLMscited by 1
  34. 2025Accepted with Minor Revisions: Value of AI-Assisted Scientific Writingcited by 1
  35. 2026Spoiler Alert: Narrative Forecasting as a Metric for Tension in LLM Storytellingcited by 1
  36. 2026StoryAlign: Evaluating and Training Reward Models for Story Generationcited by 1
  37. 2026Narrative Flattening: How Post-Training Compresses Thematic, Affective, and Stylistic Variation in LLM Fictioncited by 1
  38. 2026Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?cited by 1

50 most cited of 78 All 78 (JSON)

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  1. 2025How LLMs Comprehend Temporal Meaning in Narratives: A Case Study in Cognitive Evaluation of LLMs
  2. 2026The Storyteller in the Model: Narrative Pattern Inheritance, Escalation Dynamics, and Alignment Governance in LLMs
  3. 2026Humans vs Vision-Language Models: A Unified Measure of Narrative Coherence
  4. 2026Directional Alignment and Narrative Agency in Human-LLM Co-Writing
  5. 2025Style over Story: Measuring LLM Narrative Preferences via Structured Selection
  6. 2025EvolvTrip: Enhancing Literary Character Understanding with Temporal Theory-of-Mind Graphs
  7. 2023Are NLP Models Good at Tracing Thoughts: An Overview of Narrative Understanding
  8. 2025Language Models Might Not Understand You: Evaluating Theory of Mind via Story Prompting