Article summary
Abstract
- Positioned at the intersection of narratology, platform studies, and AI research, this article traces a genealogy from print conventions and hypertext experiments to procedurally generated and AI-assisted storytelling in the twenty-first century. We argue that algorithmic infrastructures redistribute power among authors, readers, and computational agents, creating hybrid regimes of control and agency. Through cases spanning novels, interactive fiction, and multimedia franchises, the analysis shows how platform logics, recommendation systems, and datafied attention economies shape plot construction, narrative voice, and focalization. Reader agency is theorized as choice, navigation, and co-creation, while design strategies (branching architectures, constraint systems) channel or limit participation. Ethical-legal issues—authorship, licensing, accountability—are examined alongside technical concerns such as bias, opacity, and provenance. A comparative lens foregrounds non-Western contributions and counters the Anglophone dystopia/utopia binary by revealing plural cultural imaginaries of AI. Methodologically, the article combines close reading with system-aware critique to map how computational procedures function simultaneously as narrative devices and institutional conditions of production. We conclude that AI intensifies long-standing tensions between control and openness: it decenters singular authorship yet demands new editorial stewardship, disclosure norms, and reader literacies. Narrative authority thus becomes distributed, situational, and continually negotiated across human and nonhuman actors, with implications for pedagogy, publishing policy, and future research on digital literature.