An Introduction to AI Story Generation

A primer on automated story generation and how it it strikes at some fundamental research questions in artificial intelligence.

An Introduction to AI Story Generation

Automated story generation is the use of an intelligent system to produce a fictional story from a minimal set of inputs. This is a problem that has long been explored by AI researchers, since it strikes at some fundamental research questions in artificial intelligence.

To tell a story, an intelligent system has to have a lot of knowledge, both about how to tell a story and about how the world works. These concepts need to be grounded to be able to tell coherent stories. Story generation is therefore an excellent way to know if an intelligent system truly understands something. To understand a concept, one must be able to put that concept into practice — telling a story in which a concept is used correctly is one way of doing that.