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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13248 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13248/

## Key facts

- Cited by 79 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05701/) (2018)
- [Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06774/) (2022)
- [Art or Artifice? Large Language Models and the False Promise of Creativity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14556/) (2023)
- [The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07772/) (2016)
- [Movie Plot Analysis via Turning Point Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10328/) (2019)
- [Uncovering Implicit Gender Bias in Narratives through Commonsense Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06437/) (2021)
- [Experimental Narratives: A Comparison of Human Crowdsourced Storytelling and AI Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12902/) (2023)
- [Predicting vs. Acting: A Trade-off Between World Modeling & Agent Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02446/) (2024)
- [Go Back in Time: Generating Flashbacks in Stories with Event Temporal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01898/) (2022)
- [Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15079/) (2023)
- [Measuring Psychological Depth in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12680/) (2024)
- [Contextual Affective Analysis: A Case Study of People Portrayals in Online #MeToo Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04164/) (2019)
- [Unlocking Structure Measuring: Introducing PDD, an Automatic Metric for Positional Discourse Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10175/) (2024)
- [Annotating High-Level Structures of Short Stories and Personal Anecdotes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06917/) (2017)
- [Towards a Computational Analysis of Suspense: Detecting Dangerous Situations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06818/) (2023)
- [Returning to the Start: Generating Narratives with Related Endpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00829/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14225/) (2025)
- [Can AI writing be salvaged? Mitigating Idiosyncrasies and Improving Human-AI Alignment in the Writing Process through Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14509/) (2024)
- [LLM Probability Concentration: How Alignment Shrinks the Generative Horizon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17871/) (2025)
- [Creative Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14442/) (2025)
- [CS4: Measuring the Creativity of Large Language Models Automatically by Controlling the Number of Story-Writing Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04197/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Creative Short Story Generation in Humans and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02316/) (2024)
- [StoryWriter: A Multi-Agent Framework for Long Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16445/) (2025)
- [Biased Tales: Cultural and Topic Bias in Generating Children's Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07908/) (2025)
- [Teaching Language Models To Gather Information Proactively](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21389/) (2025)
- [QUDsim: Quantifying Discourse Similarities in LLM-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09373/) (2025)
- [NarraBench: A Comprehensive Framework for Narrative Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09869/) (2025)
- [Does ChatGPT Have a Poetic Style?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15299/) (2024)
- [BookWorld: From Novels to Interactive Agent Societies for Creative Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14538/) (2025)
- [EvalAgent: Discovering Implicit Evaluation Criteria from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15219/) (2025)
- [Conversational User-AI Intervention: A Study on Prompt Rewriting for Improved LLM Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16789/) (2025)
- [TALES: A Taxonomy and Analysis of Cultural Representations in LLM-generated Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21322/) (2025)
- [Towards Enhanced Immersion and Agency for LLM-based Interactive Drama](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17878/) (2025)
- [StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03136/) (2026)
- [Optimizing Diversity and Quality through Base-Aligned Model Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05650/) (2025)
- [CML-Bench: A Framework for Evaluating and Enhancing LLM-Powered Movie Scripts Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06231/) (2025)
- [Deep Associations, High Creativity: A Simple yet Effective Metric for Evaluating Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12110/) (2025)
- [Poor Alignment and Steerability of Large Language Models: Evidence from College Admission Essays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20062/) (2025)
- [Token-Driven GammaTune: Adaptive Calibration for Enhanced Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00030/) (2025)
- [Probing and Inducing Combinational Creativity in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13120/) (2025)
- [Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15851/) (2026)
- [Evaluating the Creativity of LLMs in Persian Literary Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18401/) (2025)
- [LLMs Exhibit Significantly Lower Uncertainty in Creative Writing Than Professional Writers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16162/) (2026)
- [Narrix: Remixing Narrative Strategies from Examples for Story Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07643/) (2026)
- [Narrative Studio: Visual narrative exploration using LLMs and Monte Carlo Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02426/) (2025)
- [Societal Impacts Research Requires Benchmarks for Creative Composition Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06549/) (2025)

## 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.