creative writing teams

Abstract: As AI agents increasingly participate in creative teamwork, writing emerges from hybrid human-AI teams. Although AI can improve the creativity of individual outputs, these gains may come at the cost of homogenization. What is the best role for human intervention? We introduce a transmission-chain paradigm inspired by cognitive models of writing, with four stages: Plan, Write, Review, and Revise. Each stage receives the previous output and passes its own forward. Using data from 333 participants across 427 stories, we compared creativity, diversity, and enjoyment across human, AI, and hybrid chains. Consistent with prior work, all-AI chains produced more creative but less diverse stories than all-human chains. Introducing a single human into an otherwise all-AI chain increased diversity depending on role. Human planning provided the best balance: it preserved AI-level creativity, increased diversity that persisted through downstream AI stages, and maintained enjoyment. We discuss implications for designing human-in-the-loop creative pipelines.

Abstract: Large language models can produce fluent prose from short prompts, but direct prompt-to-text interaction gives writers limited access to the assumptions that shape a long narrative. We present Incipit, an implemented research prototype that introduces an explicit planning layer between a writer's intent and generated prose. This layer is grounded in literary axioms, defined as curated and reusable propositions about human experience and narrative craft. The prototype connects a knowledge base of 1455 axioms and 472 typed relationships with a five-round direction dialogue, a retrieval-and-selection pipeline, and a three-level blueprint covering creative premises, story beats and character arcs, and chapter outlines. Writers can inspect and edit these structures before using them as context for scene generation. Additional modules support real-event abstraction and five-dimensional diagnostic feedback. We describe the system design rationale, data flow, implementation boundaries, and a worked design example. As no controlled user study or independently rated output study has yet been completed, we do not claim that the system improves literary quality. Instead, we outline a future preregistered evaluation designed to distinguish the contribution of axiom grounding from that of hierarchical planning. The paper contributes a concrete architecture for using literary knowledge as an inspectable coordination object in human-AI writing.

Abstract: Human-LLM co-writing is increasingly used for open-ended text generation, but much prior work focuses on final outputs rather than the interactional dynamics through which stories are produced. We study turn-based collaborative storytelling across three matched conditions: Human-Human (HH), Human-LLM (HA), and LLM-LLM (AA). Using a shared storytelling paradigm, we measure how agents align, introduce novel material, and influence narrative development through turn-level measures of valence adaptation, semantic novelty, transience, and resonance. Our results show that HA co-writing is not intermediate between HH and AA collaboration. Instead, it displays a distinctive asymmetry where humans tend to introduce more novel and persistent narrative material, while LLMs tend to elaborate and stabilize the existing context. These findings suggest that, in this setting, LLMs function less as human co-authors and more as adaptive narrative amplifiers that reshape how agency is distributed in collaborative writing.