Toward an AI-Collaborated Authoring Tool for Writing Flash Fiction

Abstract

Flash fiction refers to short stories, usually around 1,000 words, featuring characteristics such as criticism, satire, and twists at the climax. This paper describes the design of an authoring tool prototype that leverages artificial intelligence technology to help novice writers easily create flash fiction. With our prototype, users can develop a plot outline by selecting a sequence of appropriate story units, then complete a story by filling in the text description. In addition, users can manually enter keywords as hashtags, or relevant hashtags can be automatically generated based on the user’s writing. Hashtags thus act as a means of communication between the user and AI during the story-writing process. After the completion of the prototype, we plan to conduct a pilot study with amateur/professional writers to investigate the prototype’s usability. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.