Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?
TL;DR
It is demonstrated that frontier models in particular converge on a "mean"generic narrative that approximates individual human stories but lacks the collective diversity of human authors, and it is shown that common mitigation strategies fail to meaningfully address this homogeneity.
Abstract
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet whether these models are capable of generating diverse or creative artifacts remains a contested question. In this work, we investigate the diversity of LLM-generated stories through the framework of narrative similarity. Using a contrastive framework and a dataset of human-written stories and prompts from r/WritingPrompts, we collect narrative similarity judgments across 10 representative LLMs, utilizing both human evaluations and three different automatic annotation methods. Our findings reveal a clear trend: LLM-generated narratives are consistently more similar to each other than human-written stories are. We demonstrate that frontier models in particular converge on a"mean"generic narrative that approximates individual human stories but lacks the collective diversity of human authors. Finally, we show that common mitigation strategies, including negative prompting and temperature scaling, fail to meaningfully address this homogeneity.
