Creativity, Math & Play
Using AI to Help Tell Stories
Also called: Generative storytelling
- Personal interest
- Philosophical question
- Working interpretation
Story systems can create believable worlds, characters and choices. I am interested in using AI to stretch imagination while people remain the authors and the meaning stays theirs.
How can a story made with a computer’s help still feel truly personal?
Why it attracts me
Stories are one of the oldest ways people explore fear, courage and kindness together. A system that helps build a story world could make that easier to start and easier to keep going. That is exciting, and easy to get wrong.
The idea
A generative story system produces parts of a story on demand. Older versions are choose-your-own-adventure books with hand-written branches. Newer versions use AI language models that can write a fresh scene for any choice. Either way, the design questions are the same: how to keep the world coherent, how to keep choices meaningful, and who counts as the author.
An example
The Bedtime Story Engine side quest turns bedtime into shared world-building. Its on-site prototype is a short, hand-written branching story: a tiny dragon finds a glowing door and sets out to return a lost lantern, while the listener chooses what happens next. The page describes the longer-term idea as a lasting story map, where characters and decisions are remembered, favorite branches can return, and memorable adventures can be kept as books. The design problem it names is “choice without chaos”: enough structure to keep the story coherent, enough freedom for the child’s decisions to matter.
Where it connects
The real point is the shared experience in Stories We Invent Together, not the technology. Keeping a story world coherent is a cousin of Designing How Software Feels, and the authorship question echoes Designing So More People Can Take Part, where technology should serve the person rather than speak for them.
Questions I'm still exploring
- How much should a story system suggest before it starts deciding for the listener?
- What makes a generated story feel like ours rather than anyone’s?
- How can a story world stay consistent across many nights without becoming predictable?
Sources and further reading
- Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997) — An early study of interactive and computer-generated storytelling.
Working interpretation: drafted from my notes and interests for review. It is not a direct quotation, and I may still change it.