This last week my students and I have been exploring the difference between plot and story ... which is a lot more difficult than it sounds. 

When students think of narrative or story, they are almost always thinking plot. When assigned to write a story, the vast majority of students simply write storylines. 

The funny thing is ... AI has the exact same problem, and it becomes obvious the more stories you auto-generate. 

AI can analyze large amounts of data and identify patterns invisible to the human eye. That's its strength.

So it is not surprising that AI can see common plot structures and map out plot variations at record time, especially given a vast amount of story-rich date it has access to. But it is important to remember that these are just linguistic predictions. AI does not see cause and effect like we do, or why one moment might be more important than another. 

When you look closely, there are actually very limited plots that we use to tell most stories ... rarely do we actually find a truly innovative plot. So it is easy for AI to make guesses here ... but it is also difficult to be creative. 

For example, AI can analyze thousands of romance novels and identify common plot points, such as the "meet up" moment or the "misunderstanding" that creates conflict between the main characters.

But AI does not have the emotional intelligence or creative intuition to know why these are important and how to connect to readers in any meaningful sense. 

It can guess, but AI needs a human to really make this happen, but this requires humans to dive into the complexities of character growth, mood and tone, and voice. That is how stories captivate and evoke emotion.

In my experience, you can get AI closer by tweaking input, but most writers will not be happy with the result ... especially if they are writing about something they care about.

Oftentimes AI (and students) generate stories with no concrete setting or specific details, which makes it difficult to ground the reader. Here is one way I used GPT-3 to improve on that problem.

 

This story is definitely an improvement, but you have to know what to ask ChatGPT to make this work ... and still may not be the story you are looking for. But it can be a great way to iterate ideas.

It matters how students approach story.

There seem to be two kinds of students in my class. Those who are really interested in writing good stories ... aspiring authors. And those who are most interested in learning more about how AI can make writing easier. Each responds to AI-generated stories differently.

The ones who really want to write start tweaking generated stories right away ... sometimes even deleting or rewriting entire chunks of text (or not even using generated text at all). They see AI as a tool to help them get started, give them ideas, or lift them out of writer's block.

The ones who are more interested in making life easier are more likely to take AI generations at face value ... sometimes even cutting and pasting an entire story. They have fun seeing what iterations they can get out of the AI, but don't see the opportunities craft the stories further.

Personally, I'm not sure one approach is worse than the other, because both methods have their place ... but the students who can make more sophisticated use of AI will definitely be more AI-proof in the future.

That said, the more we generate full stories, the flaws become more visible to students. By now, every student has generated 2-4 complete stories ... and we have done some together in class. I need to ask my students, but I feel like this takes some glow off AI ... our AI goggles come off just a little, and we realize AI can only take us so far. 

Now we can really start digging into how to use AI creatively by interacting with it in new ways.

What excites me about tools like Soduwrite is that they encourage writers to interact with AI in various ways. You can auto-generate a plot ... or generate several ideas for a plot point ... or create descriptions for the setting of a plot point. You can do it in bits, or a bunch at one time. One iteration or many.

You can even story board in their beta Canvas. I'll be having students storyboard bigger stories, so that they can explore many possibilities in their stories. Soduwrite makes this easy ... even fun.

📷 A UNCW murder mystery plotted out.

In fact, the developers have common plot structures for students to experiment with. You can enter your story, and Sudowrite will map it out. You can even generate storyboard scenes to go with each card.

📷 List of available story structures in Soduwrite.

This week, Soduwrite also gave my students free access to their Hobbyist plan for the duration of the class. So if you haven't tried it out, I would encourage you to do so. They aren't just software developers ... they are people who care about writing and students.

➡️ Click here to get a free trial.

We are on Spring break this week, but once get back, we'll develop some dialogue and start doing some collaborative storytelling to get ready for our Choose Your Own Adventure project.
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Teaching AI is now a part of every teacher's job ... which only adds to our workload. I'm currently gathering a group of teachers who are interested in sharing that workload in creative ways. If you are interested in beta testing the space, check out this page.

This will be a place where we can share our expertise and experience ... and cut down on the workload of keeping up with the exponential rise in AI technologies in ways that will help our students become more creative thinkers and writers.

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