
label “Staging language.” As they move to the middle of a story, authors “use more words that signal action,” which Boyd et al.
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They use “narrative arc analysis” accomplished by software called “Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count” (LIWC) 7 to show that the early parts of most stories contain a lot of “words that pertain to nouns and how they to one another,” which Boyd et al. Psychologists Ryan Boyd, Kate Blackburn, and James Pennebaker have developed a way of accessing the shape of a piece of writing based on the frequency of certain kinds of words at different points throughout the piece. There might be similarities between the shapes of stories and news articles written by humans and AI, but there might also be differences. There is a journalistic plot that starts with “The Lead” (spelled “lede” by many journalists-a provocative hook with essential facts), moves to “The Body” (background details), and then to “The Tail” (extra info that adds richness). 6īut news articles aren’t exactly stories and don’t, usually, have shapes like them. Many writers have described “shapes” in stories, such as Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” 5 or Kurt Vonnegut’s “8 shapes” of narratives (e.g., “Man in a Hole” and “Girl Meets Boy”). Or, as he put it: “the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.” 4 Plot, he said, is the soul of a good story. An end has antecedents (middles), but no succedents.Īristotle was pointing out something about how a good piece of writing hangs together, how its pieces interrelate to create a sense of unity. And ends have the characteristic that they follow naturally from middles, but they do resolve issues, achieving some kind of closure. A middle, then, is both implied and has implications. Middles don’t resolve the issues they might even raise more of them. A middle takes up issues that flow from beginnings and progresses them further. Those next new issues to be dealt with are middles. A beginning, then, has no antecedents, but does generate implications: new issues that need to be dealt with. By “beginning” he meant a written expression by the author that the reader would come to prepared already to recognize and understand, without any preparation by the author, and that would move the story toward subsequent issues. In Poetics, he argued that a good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The idea that writing has a shape goes back to Aristotle. This, we reasoned, has also to do with the shape of a piece of writing, not just its content. What we wanted to explore is whether a piece primarily written by an AI would resemble human-written articles in the more stylistic ways that generate subjective impressions in human readers. Many have noted that ChatGPT and other similar models can tend toward making up facts, giving weird responses, even “hallucinating,” which at least partially explains the need for human editors. It wasn’t so much content that we were curious about, however.

2 We were curious about how articles produced this way differed from human-written CNET articles 3 in how they might appeal to human readers. In late 2022, CNET started using generative AI to produce news articles that humans edited into final copy. 65/3) 2023.įigure 1: Continuum of Human AI Collaboration “Orchestrating Human-Machine Designer Ensembles During Product Innovation” by Jan Recker, Frederik von Briel, Youngjin Yoo, Varun Nagaraj, & Mickey McManus.
