As AI floods our culture, here's why we must protect human storytelling in games Buying the Zombies, Run! studio wasn't part of my plan, but a post-apocalypse game with stories that make people feel seen pulled me in Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? A few days ago, I clicked a button on my phone to send funds to a company in Singapore and so took ownership of the video game I co-created and am lead writer for: Zombies, Run! I am a novelist, I wrote the bestselling, award-winning The Power, which was turned into an Amazon Prime TV series starring Toni Collette. What on earth am I doing buying a games company?

The future of digital marketing lies in the convergence of human creativity and generative AI, where insight, strategy, and storytelling are co-authored by intelligent systems. We present MindFuse, a brave new explainable generative AI framework designed to act as a strategic partner in the marketing process. Unlike conventional LLM applications that stop at content generation, MindFuse fuses CTR-based content AI-guided co-creation with large language models to extract, interpret, and iterate on communication narratives grounded in real advertising data. MindFuse operates across the full marketing lifecycle: from distilling content pillars and customer personas from competitor campaigns to recommending in-flight optimizations based on live performance telemetry. It uses attention-based explainability to diagnose ad effectiveness and guide content iteration, while aligning messaging with strategic goals through dynamic narrative construction and storytelling. We introduce a new paradigm in GenAI for marketing, where LLMs not only generate content but reason through it, adapt campaigns in real time, and learn from audience engagement patterns. Our results, validated in agency deployments, demonstrate up to 12 times efficiency gains, setting the stage for future integration with empirical audience data (e.g., GWI, Nielsen) and full-funnel attribution modeling. MindFuse redefines AI not just as a tool, but as a collaborative agent in the creative and strategic fabric of modern marketing.

This paper introduces the art project The Dream Within Huang Long Cave, an AI-driven interactive and immersive narrative experience. The project offers new insights into AI technology, artistic practice, and psychoanalysis. Inspired by actual geographical landscapes and familial archetypes, the work combines psychoanalytic theory and computational technology, providing an artistic response to the concept of "the nonexistence of the Big Other." The narrative is driven by a combination of a large language model (LLM) and a realistic digital character, forming a virtual agent named YELL. Through dialogue and exploration within a cave automatic virtual environment (CA VE), the audience is invited to unravel the language puzzles presented by YELL and help him overcome his life challenges. YELL is a fictional embodiment of the "Big Other," modeled after the artist's real father. Through a cross-temporal interaction with this digital father, the project seeks to deconstruct complex familial relationships. By demonstrating "the non-existence of the Big Other," we aim to underscore the authenticity of interpersonal emotions, positioning art as a bridge for emotional connection and understanding within family dynamics.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots powered by a large language model (LLM) are entering young children's learning and play, yet little is known about how young children construe these agents or how such construals relate to engagement. We examined anthropomorphism of a social AI chatbot during collaborative storytelling and asked how children's attributions related to their behavior and prefrontal activation. Children at ages 5-6 (N = 23) completed three storytelling sessions: interacting with (1) an AI chatbot only, (2) a parent only, and (3) the AI and a parent together. After the sessions, children completed an interview assessing anthropomorphism toward both the AI chatbot and the parent. Behavioral engagement was indexed by the conversational turn count (CTC) ratio, and concurrent fNIRS measured oxygenated hemoglobin in bilateral vmPFC and dmPFC regions. Children reported higher anthropomorphism for parents than for the AI chatbot overall, although AI ratings were relatively high for perceptive abilities and epistemic states. Anthropomorphism was not associated with CTC. In the right dmPFC, higher perceptive scores were associated with greater activation during the AI-only condition and with lower activation during the AI+Parent condition. Exploratory analyses indicated that higher dmPFC activation during the AI-only condition correlated with higher end-of-session "scared" mood ratings. Findings suggest that stronger perceptive anthropomorphism can be associated with greater brain activation related to interpreting the AI's mental states, whereas parent co-presence may help some children interpret and regulate novel AI interactions. These results may have design implications for encouraging parent-AI co-use in early childhood.

Associative thinking--the ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas--is a foundational element of human creativity and problem-solving. This paper explores whether reinforcement learning (RL) guided by associative thinking principles can enhance a model's performance across diverse generative tasks, including story writing, code generation, and chart creation. We introduce a reinforcement learning framework that uses a prompt-based evaluation mechanism, incorporating established divergent thinking metrics from creativity research. A base language model is fine-tuned using this framework to reward outputs demonstrating higher novelty through higher degrees of conceptual connectivity. Interestingly, the experimental results suggest that RL-based associative thinking-trained models not only generate more original and coherent stories but also exhibit improved abstraction and flexibility in tasks such as programming and data visualization. Our findings provide initial evidence that modeling cognitive creativity principles through reinforcement learning can yield more adaptive and generative AI.

We present a hierarchical knowledge graph framework for the structured semantic understanding of visual narratives, using comics as a representative domain for multimodal storytelling. The framework organizes narrative content across three levels-panel, event, and macro-event, by integrating symbolic graphs that encode semantic, spatial, and temporal relationships. At the panel level, it models visual elements such as characters, objects, and actions alongside textual components including dialogue and narration. These are systematically connected to higher-level graphs that capture narrative sequences and abstract story structures. Applied to a manually annotated subset of the Manga109 dataset, the framework supports interpretable symbolic reasoning across four representative tasks: action retrieval, dialogue tracing, character appearance mapping, and timeline reconstruction. Rather than prioritizing predictive performance, the system emphasizes transparency in narrative modeling and enables structured inference aligned with cognitive theories of event segmentation and visual storytelling. This work contributes to explainable narrative analysis and offers a foundation for authoring tools, narrative comprehension systems, and interactive media applications.

To build AI that children can intuitively understand and benefit from, designers need a design grammar that serves their developmental needs. This paper bridges artificial intelligence design for children - an emerging field still defining its best practices - and animation, a well established field with decades of experience in engaging children through accessible storytelling. Pairing Piagetian developmental theory with design pattern extraction from 52 works of animation, the paper presents a six scaffold framework that integrates design insights transferable to child centred AI design: (1) signals for visual animacy and clarity, (2) sound for musical and auditory scaffolding, (3) synchrony in audiovisual cues, (4) sidekick style personas, (5) storyplay that supports symbolic play and imaginative exploration, and (6) structure in the form of predictable narratives. These strategies, long refined in animation, function as multimodal scaffolds for attention, understanding, and attunement, supporting learning and comfort. This structured design grammar is transferable to AI design. By reframing cinematic storytelling and child development theory as design logic for AI, the paper offers heuristics for AI that aligns with the cognitive stages and emotional needs of young users. The work contributes to design theory by showing how sensory, affective, and narrative techniques can inform developmentally attuned AI design. Future directions include empirical testing, cultural adaptation, and participatory co design.

LLMs hallucinate, yet some confabulations can have social affordances if carefully bounded. We propose critical confabulation (inspired by critical fabulation from literary and social theory), the use of LLM hallucinations to "fill-in-the-gap" for omissions in archives due to social and political inequality, and reconstruct divergent yet evidence-bound narratives for history's "hidden figures". We simulate these gaps with an open-ended narrative cloze task: asking LLMs to generate a masked event in a character-centric timeline sourced from a novel corpus of unpublished texts. We evaluate audited (for data contamination), fully-open models (the OLMo-2 family) and unaudited open-weight and proprietary baselines under a range of prompts designed to elicit controlled and useful hallucinations. Our findings validate LLMs' foundational narrative understanding capabilities to perform critical confabulation, and show how controlled and well-specified hallucinations can support LLM applications for knowledge production without collapsing speculation into a lack of historical accuracy and fidelity.

Human-like virtual characters are crucial for games, storytelling, and virtual reality, yet current methods rely heavily on annotated data or handcrafted persona prompts, making it difficult to scale up and generate realistic, contextually coherent personas. We create the first QA dataset for BaZi-based persona reasoning, where real human experiences categorized into wealth, health, kinship, career, and relationships are represented as life-event questions and answers. Furthermore, we propose the first BaZi-LLM system that integrates symbolic reasoning with large language models to generate temporally dynamic and fine-grained virtual personas. Compared with mainstream LLMs such as DeepSeek-v3 and GPT-5-mini, our method achieves a 30.3%-62.6% accuracy improvement. In addition, when incorrect BaZi information is used, our model's accuracy drops by 20%-45%, showing the potential of culturally grounded symbolic-LLM integration for realistic character simulation.

Spatio-temporal data captures complex dynamics across both space and time, yet traditional visualizations are complex, require domain expertise and often fail to resonate with broader audiences. Here, we propose MapMuse, a storytelling-based framework for interpreting spatio-temporal datasets, transforming them into compelling, narrative-driven experiences. We utilize large language models and employ retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and agent-based techniques to generate comprehensive stories. Drawing on principles common in cinematic storytelling, we emphasize clarity, emotional connection, and audience-centric design. As a case study, we analyze a dataset of taxi trajectories. Two perspectives are presented: a captivating story based on a heat map that visualizes millions of taxi trip endpoints to uncover urban mobility patterns; and a detailed narrative following a single long taxi journey, enriched with city landmarks and temporal shifts. By portraying locations as characters and movement as plot, we argue that data storytelling drives insight, engagement, and action from spatio-temporal information. The case study illustrates how MapMuse can bridge the gap between data complexity and human understanding. The aim of this short paper is to provide a glimpse to the potential of the cinematic storytelling technique as an effective communication tool for spatio-temporal data, as well as to describe open problems and opportunities for future research.