# Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17350 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17350/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Art or Artifice? Large Language Models and the False Promise of Creativity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14556/) (2023)
- [Verbalized Sampling: How to Mitigate Mode Collapse and Unlock LLM Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01171/) (2025)
- [A Confederacy of Models: a Comprehensive Evaluation of LLMs on Creative Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08433/) (2023)
- [Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13248/) (2024)
- [Calibrating Language Models with Adaptive Temperature Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19817/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Diversity and Quality of LLM Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12522/) (2025)
- [Echoes in AI: Quantifying lack of plot diversity in LLM outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00273/) (2024)
- [AI as Humanity's Salieri: Quantifying Linguistic Creativity of Language Models via Systematic Attribution of Machine Text against Web Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04265/) (2024)
- [Small Language Models can Outperform Humans in Short Creative Writing: A Study Comparing SLMs with Humans and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11547/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Creativity Evaluation: A Critical Analysis of Existing Creativity Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05470/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Text Creativity across Diverse Domains: A Dataset and Large Language Model Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19236/) (2025)
- [Can Good Writing Be Generative? Expert-Level AI Writing Emerges through Fine-Tuning on High-Quality Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18353/) (2026)
- [Pencils to Pixels: A Systematic Study of Creative Drawings across Children, Adults and AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05999/) (2025)
- [Measuring LLM Novelty As The Frontier Of Original And High-Quality Output](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09389/) (2025)
- [Avoidance Decoding for Diverse Multi-Branch Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02170/) (2025)
- [SemEval-2026 Task 4: Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21782/) (2026)
- [LLMs Generate Kitsch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25929/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Scaling Long-Form Story Generation via Narrative State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35759/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet whether these models are capable of generating diverse or creative artifacts remains a contested question. In this work, we investigate the diversity of LLM-generated stories through the framework of narrative similarity. Using a contrastive framework and a dataset of human-written stories and prompts from r/WritingPrompts, we collect narrative similarity judgments across 10 representative LLMs, utilizing both human evaluations and three different automatic annotation methods. Our findings reveal a clear trend: LLM-generated narratives are consistently more similar to each other than human-written stories are. We demonstrate that frontier models in particular converge on a "mean" generic narrative that approximates individual human stories but lacks the collective diversity of human authors. Finally, we show that common mitigation strategies, including negative prompting and temperature scaling, fail to meaningfully address this homogeneity.