The Art of Creating Suspense in Storytelling

Today we’re joined by Mark Riedl, a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. In our conversation with Mark, we explore his work building AI storytelling systems, mainly those that try and predict what listeners think will happen next in a story and how he brings together many different threads of ML/AI together to solve these problems. We discuss how the theory of mind is layered into his research, the use of large language models like GPT-3, and his push towards being able to generate suspenseful stories with these systems. 

We also discuss the concept of intentional creativity and the lack of good theory on the subject, the adjacent areas in ML that he’s most excited about for their potential contribution to his research, his recent focus on model explainability, how he approaches problems of common sense, and much more! 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/478.