In our technological age, nothing is sacred, not even storytelling. Once the sacred purview of visionaries and seers, storytelling now finds itself being analyzed by poets, writers, geniuses, fools, and of course artificial intelligences of the mechanical kind. Here’s the latest update on what the A.I.s are finding. To paraphrase an ancient story title from the earliest days of Mad Magazine, “Believe it or Don’t!”
Sorry, it’s the best we could do. A good arc is hard to find, you know?[Recently,] a group of researchers, from the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide, set out to do verify Kurt Vonnegut’s thoughts about story forms and storytelling. They collected computer-generated story arcs for nearly 2,000 works of fiction, classifying each into one of six core types of narratives (based on what happens to the protagonist):
