TITAA #61.5: Narrative Time Is Hard
Video Gen - Dysentery - 3D Worlds - Gemini 2 - Houska Castle - Story Events
TOC (links on the web page):
Intro words: Workshop and Narrative Time
AI Creativity News (Video, 3D & Worlds, Story/Narrative, Misc AI)
Weird & Esoteric News (Science, Folklore & Archaeo, Art, AI/LLM)
Workshop and Narrative Time
Before the extreme news, I wanted to give a brief shoutout to the excellent (if I do say so) Creative Narrative Workshop I co-organized (with Maria Antoniak) and spoke at in Copenhagen a week ago. On the tail end of a great computational humanities research conference, we hosted a mix of NLP (natural language processing) people and game designers and writers talking about AI and narrative. Plus an excellent group of attendees. The web page (here again) has links to the public shared slides or web sites. My intro talk was a tour of various text-related experimental demos or projects that use AI and/or NLP in some form.
A few items from the games folks who wanted to share (see link above): Kate Compton’s talk on Gum, Girders, and Gargoyles, from the AI & Games event I wrote about here, with a few more slides (check the ontology and notation examples!); Martin Pichlmair and Charlene Putney on game writing, writing with AI tools, and co-creativity; Brian Yazell on doing flash fiction with Danish students about climate change (they think Denmark will be fine, but the US is f*cked), and Shalev Moran doing interesting AR tourism stuff with audio fiction. The persistence of dystopias in today’s world—and how to avoid that mindset—came up several times. I am personally flummoxed by games like this—“I am Future” (nevertheless on my wishlist):
I Am Future is a relaxing single-player survival game about building a cozy rooftop camp amid a flooded post-apocalyptic city. Set up a farm, go fishing, tinker with gadgets, craft new tools, manage a team of cute robots to automate and expand your base, explore the mysterious world, and chill out!
Do we need a post-capitalist, wet world to relax, finally? Does all that sound relaxing? You tell me.
The NLP folks at the workshop shared fewer slides, so I linked to some paper pages instead. Speaking of capitalism, Jenny Fu shared work on how unemployed users of AI writing tools helping with resume writing feel less empowered than employed users; Emilie Sitter spoke about a project to study linguistic creativity, which excited me; Kent Chang reviewed his extensive work with David Bamman on corpus analysis and cultural analysis, including the classification work I’ve linked here and the how-many-books-has-GPT-memorized work.
Anna Rogers ended us with a presentation about the difficulties in labeling the order of narrative events in news data, which was fascinating. Hopefully I’ll still get a link to her slides. The paper itself doesn’t convey the agony of how hard this task was and how little the annotators agreed, although the appendices get a bit close.
In linguistics, we learn about “tense”, “aspect”, and “modality” as lenses on which to look at linguistic events (see wikipedia where I also learned about mirativity). “Aspect” relates to whether an event is punctual or ongoing (“he walked” vs. “he was walking”) and modality handles distinctions like “real” or factual events vs. negated or possible events (“he might have walked”). And then there are nominal events like “an evacuation” or “a murder,” embedded in discourse of multiple sentences with tenses, aspects, and moods. All of these play into the problem of labeling and ordering events in even simple news discourse.
For instance, given a statement, “The director ordered the evacuation,” does the evacuation necessarily follow the order? Or could they overlap? Is the evacuation an ongoing event? The context helps, of course, but to a limit. In a murder mystery, the director might have ordered an evacuation afterwards, to cover his ass for something.
One of the common popular definitions of “story” is that it is simply an ordered sequence of events. E.M. Forster's example (in Aspects of the Novel) is “The king died and then the queen died.” The word “then” does a lot of work here to order these events and make them punctual. The “plot” here is that there is a causation implied. “Narrative” is often considered to be the way the story is told — with nonlinearity, for instance (re-ordering the events in presentation, but not time). I find it a bit, uh, exercising that language and discourse are evidently so hard to interpret with respect to event sequencing; I wonder if we think things are sequential (and causal) due to Gricean maxims—assumptions that speakers and writers are ordering things truthfully, relevantly, clearly when they present events.
Well, that all requires a lot more thinking and researching. Onto the news. Oof, it’s been a packed 2 weeks. This is a mega update of news. In it we hit: the new video gen models and modes (including Pika 2), Gemini 2, a bunch of 3D world modeling projects, Midjourney Patchwork, some great folklore items in Weird & Esoteric including 14th century ghost stories and hell holes, Caves of Qud 1.0, LLM bullshit weirdness, more embedding projects, RAG interpretation heat maps, drones, puppets, mirror science, Aztec screaming skulls…. well, a ton of stuff.
The news links are for paid supporters every mid-month. Also, a reminder that the annual Best of Year recap of books, tv, and games is for the supporters as well. Happy holidays!