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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



Find me an option that works like GDocs keeping a running history of writing and editing, and I’ll consider it.
I have receipts for the integrity of my writing. I dont need some shitty tool to validate it.
You can literally just type what the ai says into Google Docs.
I hate using it to write.
It tracks the edits. If you generate a whole doc in one shot then it’s obviously AI.
If you have a shitty draft, then a slightly less shitty draft, then… … … Then a quality end product, you can see how the human worked.
AI can’t really replicate that.
I only ever wrote first drafts when they were forced upon me in school. There might be some edits, but my first draft is largely what I would submit because I hated to write as a kid and didn’t want to write the same thing 3-5 times by hand before submitting it. A small benefit from being around before computers were so common was learning how to write a paragraph ahead in my mind, it would help me catch anything I was about to forget to include, or to remove a trailing thought before I wrote it out.
I hated writing by hand, too.
I had to write more starting in junior high (middle school). This was back in the late 70s. We had an old, non-electric typewriter at home, so, I took typing in seventh grade. For final edit, I’d cut the sheets up and use white out, and then take the taped up mess to a store with a copy machine. That’s how I got through high school English classes, too.
Later, when I got into graphic design as a profession, I learned this was common practice, and called “paste up”.
That’s not how story writing works. Or any long form written art works for that matter. Try to ask any writer if they ever “write in their head” and publish those as a book as-is
Some moron is gonna vibe code a script that spoofs this on the surface. Yea it’ll be detectable, but not detected in most cases.
I love that docs receipt feature and agree with you. Great call.
Forgive me being well-meaningly obnoxious, but make sure to get receipts outside of the Google ecosystem too. As a professional writer/editor myself, I’ve heard horror stories about folks losing access to an account, and therefore the receipts.
I am also skeptical of these kinds of tools.
Never trust any cloud storage that you do not personally have access to cold back ups of.
This is data storage 101!