Talk
ICS Colloquium: Lisa Marshall and Dr. Maria Antoniak, Associate Director of Science Storytelling and Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder
When
· 12:00 PM MDT
Shown in the venue’s time zone (America/Denver), not yours.
Where
Muenzinger Psychology, D430/428
Boulder, CO
Tickets
No on-sale date recorded
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What the source said
Title: In the Garden of Forking Paths: Mapping and Making Sense of Storytelling at Scale Abstract: Humans tell stories for many different purposes—to drive social movements, build trust, make sense of the world—and increasingly, we tell stories with and about AI. In this talk, I argue that instead of building benchmarks for AI-generated stories, we need descriptive, analytical methods for exploring and mapping narrative space. I present a series of projects that chart where storytelling happens and how it is changing by locating stories across online communities, characterizing narrative content in web-scale LLM pretraining data, and tracing how people iteratively generate and edit fiction in real user-chatbot conversations. This work reveals narrative axes that organize pretraining data, “solipsistic reader-writers” who obsessively regenerate the same stories in loops with chatbots, and edit trees representing the “forking paths” that people trace when exploring narrative space. The future study of storytelling needs more mixed-methods and cross-disciplinary collaboration, open and auditable data and models, and room to craft our own stories. Bio: Maria Antoniak is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder where she is also affiliated with the Department of Information Science and a member of the Boulder NLP Group. Previously, she was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI and a postdoc at the Pioneer Centre for AI at the University of Copenhagen. She completed her PhD in Information Science at Cornell University and her master’s degree in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington. She has also spent time at places like ETH Zürich, Microsoft Research FATE, Twitter Cortex, and Facebook Core Data Science.