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StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction
arxiv.orgAs AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space focuses on identifying surface-level signatures of AI writing, we ask instead whether AI-generated stories can be distinguished from human ones without relying on stylistic signals, focusing on discourse-level narrative choices such as character agency and chronological discontinuity. We propose StoryScope, a pipeline that automatically induces a fine-grained, interpretable feature space of discourse-level narrative features across 10 dimensions. We apply StoryScope to a parallel corpus of 10,272 writing prompts, each written by a human author and five LLMs, yielding 61,608 stories, each ~5,000 words, and 304 extracted features per story. Narrative features alone achieve 93.2% macro-F1 for human vs. AI detection and 68.4% macro-F1 for six-way authorship attribution, retaining over 97% of the performance of models that include stylistic cues. A compact set of 30 core narrative features captures much of this signal: AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist' choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity. Per-model fingerprint features enable six-way attribution: for example, Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.
Abstract page for arXiv paper 2604.03136: StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction



I can’t even imagine what dickhead is saying there. Is he implying that the mean real people are bullying the sensitive AI babies?
Since Ben Garrison is the one human whose output most closely resembles AI, I imagine this is him having an existential crisis.
You’re saying an actual human called that thing both “pen & ink” and a “typewrite”?
… Also labeled the clearly working lamp as “power outage”
… And doesn’t understand how USB works
I don’t buy it. Even if Ben did real drawing in the past, he clearly isn’t now. Edit: Or as a reply pointed out, the signature could be fake too with Ben not involved.
It’s Ben Garrison! Dude can’t get an erection unless he labels every single goddamn thing. While being barely coherent. He’s been doing this for ages!
Is this real? Or is it a fake comic making fun of Ben Garrison? It’s hard to tell. I’d expect better even from him, which is saying a lot.
I dont think this is real. Definitely AI generated, very unlikely to be his actual work.
I agree, reverse image search isn’t coming up with anything for this one, but it works on other comics from his site. Seems to be an imitation.
He’s always been a big fan of labels.
Why did I think he had died? Probably getting him mixed up with Scott Adams.
I agree with you, it’s a typical example of a Garrison cartoon. It’s so boringly obvious on a surface level that you can’t help but assume there’s some idiotic alt-right subtext.
what? bro the joke is that ai writers are not real writers, it’s not that deep.
Ironically, I expect AI would probably give a more accurate summary / explanation of the comic than you just did.
I just tried with the lowest end local model I could find. It did in fact do a better job than him…
That’s an oof
Neither are you apparently