Storytelling by computer
Mike Sharpies · Digital Creativity · 1997
In common with designing programs to pass the Turing Test, story generation is an aspect of artificial intelligence that has popular appeal but has never been regarded as a core research activity. But storytelling is an activity that characterises human intelligence, and computational story writing offers new perspectives on human and digital creativity. This paper reviews work at the University of Sussex and elsewhere on story generation. It describes the main approaches, based on story grammars and character plans, and discusses their limitations. Although the results so far are unimpressive, the process of designing such programs is worthwhile. The modest successes indicate facets of creativity that can be described in computational terms. The failures reveal aspects of creative writing, such as tellability, that have previously received little attention, in a form that can be examined and systematically manipulated. The computational techniques developed for story generation could form the basis of learning environments for children to simulate and explore the process of storytelling, and of a new generation of storytelling software agents.