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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



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.
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.
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!