Article In: Narrative Inquiry: Online-First Articles
Do AI stories align with the laws of the story economy?
Narrative prototype and platformed alignment in LLMs
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Abstract
The article situates LLM-generated narratives within the
twenty-first-century story economy by asking how they rework the storytelling patterns
shaped by social media, algorithmic optimization, and the pursuit of the “compelling
story.” Previous research has shown that stories gaining traction on social media conform
to the experiential narrative prototype outlined by sociolinguistics and cognitive
narratology, and that this prototype overlaps with the universalist conceptions of
narrative promoted by storytelling manuals and consultancy practices since the 1990s. We
examine whether this prototype, which privileges personal transformation, survives in the
training materials of LLMs and persists through alignment processes. We analyze 60 stories
generated through minimal prompting using DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Grok. The
results point towards the emergence of a new narrative prototype that invites us to
reconsider narrative capital as it was understood in the Web 2.0 era with social media as
its main narrative environments.
Article outline
- Introduction
- The experiential narrative prototype as narrative capital in digital platforms
- The constraints and biases of LLM-generated “stories”
- Methods and research design
- Copilot and ChatGPT
- DeepSeek
- Grok
- Discussion
- Conclusion
- Notes
References
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