Can AI tell good stories? Narrative Transportation and Persuasion with ChatGPT

Abstract

Storytelling is a human universal, but can Artificial Intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT tell a good story? Based on three pre-registered experiments, we investigated if narratives generated by ChatGPT or human lead to different levels of transportation, counterarguing, psychological reactance, self-referencing, and story-consistent attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Drawing on narratives examined in existing research, we crafted three narratives of comparable length and content using ChatGPT and labeled them alongside human-authored narratives as either human or AI-generated. Our findings indicate that labeling a narrative as AI-generated led to lower transportation, higher counterarguing, and lower story-consistent beliefs. However, AI-generated narratives surpassed their human-generated counterparts in reducing counterarguing and promoting story-consistent attitudes and behavioral intention, except when adapting pre-existing stories. We conclude that public skepticism towards AI persists, but language models such as ChatGPT hold the potential to outperform human writers, particularly when provided with fewer instructions.

Engaging with Bot Narratives: The Audience Experience and Perceptions of Machine Script Writers

“…Future work could take professionally-written fiction and have AI rewrite it, to provide comparison between author types (cf. Chu & Liu, 2023), or give similar prompts to human and bot writers.…”

“…There are other important facets of narrative reception that we did not measure, such as eudaimonia or appreciation (Oliver & Bartsch, 2010). A recent experiment tested ChatGPT narratives (vs. human) narratives in term of their narrative transportation (which has some conceptual overlap with narrative engagement), but also with key persuasive processes such as counterarguing and outcomes such as story-consistent attitudes (Chu & Liu, 2023).…”