AI Storytelling (2)
An expensive addiction
There is something addictive about having your own story told to you. A story that has never been told to anyone before. A story whose course you can influence yourself. Well told.
Whether it is really told that well, I'll come back to later. But what I have learned, after quite a few started and not yet finished stories in my "AI-generated text adventure" app: this is an expensive pastime.
Costs incurred:
* Claude: 12 dollars - for the initial generation of the world, the characters, the places, the plot with Opus 4.6 (insanely expensive) and generating the next piece of story + action options with Sonnet 4.6 (expensive, but not quite as expensive).
* OpenAI: 10 dollars - for speaking the texts
You can also get books for that.
Apart from the fact that I would never have expected OpenAI to charge so royally for reading text aloud, the costs are not entirely unexpected.
After all, you want to hand over the generation of a world and a story in it to the best AI you can find (I could also have taken GPT-5.4, but I'm currently fasting from OpenAI. For reasons). On the other hand, with every step you have to pass a lot of context to the AI so that characters do not suddenly change gender, objects do not disappear, and memories of past parts of the plot do not shift. Concretely, that means:
- Generating a story with Opus 4.6: 1000 tokens in, 5000 tokens out.
- Advancing the story (about 5 minutes of text): 17000 tokens in, 1000 tokens out. An hour of reading therefore costs 340,000 input tokens and 20,000 output tokens. That gets expensive quickly, specifically: $1 + $0.3 = 1.30 dollars per hour of reading.
How? What?
In case you didn't read my last blog post: I'm talking about a small app that I, or more precisely an AI, wrote to have text adventures à la Zork generated by an AI.
Here is the link to github if you want to play around with it yourself:
If you try it out, you notice that the whole thing is more of an interactive audiobook. The AI is good at telling stories; puzzles do not really play a role. Maybe that's my prompt's fault. And sometimes the AI writes fantastically.
Here is the beginning of a horror story it recently wrote for me:
"The bus drops you at the end of Route 1A like something being expelled. The driver — a heavyset man who hasn't spoken since Augusta — actually flinches when you step off, as though he's been holding his breath the whole last twenty miles and can finally let it go. The door hisses shut behind you with an urgency that borders on rude, and the bus pulls away trailing diesel smoke that hangs in the air too long, as if the atmosphere here is thicker than it should be, more reluctant to move.
You are Nora Thatch. You are thirty-eight years old. You have told the rental agency, the bus company, and the reservation clerk at the Briar Sound Motor Lodge that you are an insurance adjuster investigating structural complaints. This is a lie. You are here because your brother Marcus is dead."
Impressive. No other way to put it. Impressive.
But: style
The AI's style reminds me of my time with Stephen King's horror novels. At first, the teenager I was was completely blown away. Told excitingly, you devour the books. Later I noticed that he uses the same few stylistic devices again and again (italicized emotional sentences like "please don't let them have found the knife" or emotional glimpses into the future like "He would never see her again"), which then, no longer being a teenager, rather bored me.
That's roughly how I feel about Claude. The AI has a certain way of describing things, of using metaphors...
- She goes very still. Not the stillness of someone thinking, but the stillness of a small animal that has heard a sound it recognizes.
- She looks at you the way a cartographer looks at a map that has started to disagree with the territory
- It's more like looking through a window you didn't know was there into a room that shouldn't fit inside the building.
Sometimes these metaphors work well, sometimes they don't, and their constant use is tiring.
But: plot
It is a high art to move a plot forward at exactly the right speed. Some authors can do that well (I'm currently listening to Eden by Marc Elsberg, he can simply do it). Others not so well (Black Forest by Wolfgang Schorlau I recently abandoned after 10% because the author got lost in such terribly tiring descriptions of every little detail that it was simply unbearable).
To be honest, I don't know how to teach this art to an AI. What is the prompt for "Tell the story at exactly the right pace"? How do you make it clear that stories also have a rhythm, that it makes a difference whether you are just arriving on a new planet in a science fiction story, which you describe with relish, or whether you are being chased by someone? The AI tells both in the same style.
In addition, you have to know — and this is especially difficult in an interactive book — where you want to go with the plot as an author. This, too, is hard to teach an AI. Accordingly, with most stories I eventually catch myself in a "now get on with it" mood. I need to try pushing things forward roughly myself — the app always shows me 4 options, but I can also type something in myself, hmm, for example: "Go back into the pub and kill the barkeeper". No idea what would happen then.
Conclusion
Recently I listened to a (pretty brilliant) podcast by ZEIT. In it, the philosopher Markus Gabriel also reflected on AIs, emphasizing one aspect that had never occurred to me. We know that LLMs have learned all the texts of the internet. Billions of human-written sentences. And being the cerebral creatures we are, we primarily associate that with accumulated world knowledge in the neural nets of LLMs. But we are emotional beings, and our language is an expression of emotions. And the machines have learned those concepts too.
Accordingly, knowing how dramatic the speed of AI development is, it is not a sci-fi notion that they will soon write better — yes, better — than we do. That perhaps the idea that AI will write commercial literature in 2030, while only humans will still be able to put true art, true emotionality into words, may be wrong.
And I still find the "killer feature" that this is my book, my story, which I can influence, which is told only for me, great.
It remains exciting.