Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fundal, Halfdan Nordahl, Bizzoni, Yuri
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23676
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917437262266368
author Fundal, Halfdan Nordahl
Bizzoni, Yuri
author_facet Fundal, Halfdan Nordahl
Bizzoni, Yuri
contents We investigate narrative agency in human-LLM creative co-writing, asking who drives story development in turn-based collaboration. Using a new corpus of 87 human-LLM co-written stories, we apply sentiment and semantic modeling to quantify affective alignment and semantic novelty in turn-taking, and directional measures to assess which agent shapes narrative progression. Our results show asymmetric influence: human turns introduce greater semantic novelty and are more likely to shape subsequent developments, whereas LLM contributions predominantly elaborate on human-introduced elements. At the sentiment level, alignment is also asymmetric, but more bidirectional: LLMs exhibit stronger turn-level emotional adaptation than humans, but both agents track each other's emotional valence and LLMs show an independent tendency to more positive emotional baselines. These findings indicate a complementary division of labor in human-LLM co-writing, where humans drive narrative innovation and direction, while LLMs act as adaptive amplifiers that sustain coherence and elaborate emerging narratives.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_23676
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Directional Alignment and Narrative Agency in Human-LLM Co-Writing
Fundal, Halfdan Nordahl
Bizzoni, Yuri
Human-Computer Interaction
We investigate narrative agency in human-LLM creative co-writing, asking who drives story development in turn-based collaboration. Using a new corpus of 87 human-LLM co-written stories, we apply sentiment and semantic modeling to quantify affective alignment and semantic novelty in turn-taking, and directional measures to assess which agent shapes narrative progression. Our results show asymmetric influence: human turns introduce greater semantic novelty and are more likely to shape subsequent developments, whereas LLM contributions predominantly elaborate on human-introduced elements. At the sentiment level, alignment is also asymmetric, but more bidirectional: LLMs exhibit stronger turn-level emotional adaptation than humans, but both agents track each other's emotional valence and LLMs show an independent tendency to more positive emotional baselines. These findings indicate a complementary division of labor in human-LLM co-writing, where humans drive narrative innovation and direction, while LLMs act as adaptive amplifiers that sustain coherence and elaborate emerging narratives.
title Directional Alignment and Narrative Agency in Human-LLM Co-Writing
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23676