Storytelling with Language Models: Narrative Theory meets Generative AI

Narrative theories and terminologies have long found application in computational research concerned with automatic story generation. Following the launch of Large Language Models (LLMs), a subset of Generative AI, computational systems have started to exhibit greater fluency in story generation and analysis tasks. The wide release and massive cultural uptake of LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude signal a paradigm shift in what narratives are and how they function. In this special issue on storytelling with language models, scholars from different sub-fields of narrative study come together to advance our understanding of how GenAI is intervening in storytelling practices. They do so by examining texts emerging from collaborations between humans and language models, public narratives about GenAI, and potential societal and personal impacts of widespread access to GenAI storytelling tools.