Hey Siri, tell me a story: Digital storytelling and AI authorship

Surveying narrative applications of artificial intelligence in film, games and interactive fiction, this article imagines the future of artificial intelligence (AI) authorship and explores trends that seek to replace human authors with algorithmically generated narrative. While experimental works that draw on text generation and natural language processing have a rich history, this article focuses on commercial applications of AI narrative and looks to future applications of this technology. Video games have incorporated AI and procedural generation for many years, but more recently, new applications of this technology have emerged in other media. Director Oscar Sharp and artist Ross Goodwin, for example, generated significant media buzz about two short films that they produced which were written by their AI screenwriter. It's No Game (2017), in particular, offers an apt commentary on the possibility of replacing striking screenwriters with AI authors. Increasingly, AI agents and virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant are incorporated into our daily lives. As concerns about their eavesdropping circulate in news media, it is clear that these companions are learning a lot about us, which raises concerns about how our data might be employed in the future. This article explores current applications of AI for storytelling and future directions of this technology to offer insight into issues that have and will continue to arise as AI storytelling advances.