ICS Colloquium: Lisa Marshall and Dr. Maria Antoniak, Associate Director of Science Storytelling and Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder

Title: In the Garden of Forking Paths: Mapping and Making Sense of Storytelling at Scale Abstract: Humans tell stories for many different purposes—to drive social movements, build trust, make sense of the world—and increasingly, we tell stories with and about AI. In this talk, I argue that instead of building benchmarks for AI-generated stories, we need descriptive, analytical methods for exploring and mapping narrative space. I present a series of projects that chart where storytelling happens and how it is changing by locating stories across online communities, characterizing narrative content in web-scale LLM pretraining data, and tracing how people iteratively generate and edit fiction in real user-chatbot conversations. This work reveals narrative axes that organize pretraining data, “solipsistic reader-writers” who obsessively regenerate the same stories in loops with chatbots, and edit trees representing the “forking paths” that people trace when exploring narrative space. The f...