Human cognition-generated narratological agency is distinct from the narrative capacities of Artificial Intelligence. The central component of experiencing a lived reality in real time distinguishes the human narrator from the AI narrator in terms of conscious creative agency. In his work, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, Mark Turner emphasises the centrality of storytelling to human cognition as well as to our fundamental cognitive instruments for planning and explaining different phenomena.
More recently, scholarship by David Herman has been influential in advancing the field of cognitive approaches to narratology. In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Herman points out that “Narrative at once reflects and reinforces the supra-individual nature of intelligence... Narrative bridges self and other, creating a network of relations between storytellers, the participants whose experiences they recount, and the larger environment embedding those experiences, including the setting afforded by the activity of storytelling itself.” This idea of ‘distributed intelligence’ not only posits a distinction between the ‘self’ and the ‘environment’ but can also be extended to emphasise the uniquely human capacity to bridge the individual with the external reality. This human capacity distinguishes itself from AI-generated narratives that lack the ability to bridge the self with the external milieu.
A further point of distinction between AI-driven narratives and human cognition-driven narratology follows from the arguments of Antonio Damasio that were cited by David Herman in his book, Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. “The neuroscientist and philosopher António Damasio... draws a distinction between what he calls core selfhood, based on a transient core consciousness (re)created through experiences occurring in the here and now, and what he terms extended or autobiographical selfhood, based on ‘a repository of memories for fundamental facts in an individual biography that can be partly reactivated and thus provide continuity and seeming permanence in our lives’.”
Damasio’s thesis can be extended to argue that the capacity of the human narrator to write, for instance, a semi-autobiographical novel cannot be adequately replicated by AI tools as such an ability necessitates the pre-existence of having experienced a lived reality. However, this ‘capacity of the human narrator to write’ cannot be understood in isolation from authorial intention or the narrator’s creative agency, which leads us to multiple questions about the extent of discretion to which AI can operate with authorial intention.
The idea of narratological agency was elaborated upon by Herman in his work titled Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Here, Herman argues, “Defeasible ascriptions of intention and other reasons for action are inextricably interwoven with the experiences that support, or alternatively are supported by, engagements with narratives of all sorts… When interpreters map textual patterns onto Who, What, Where, When, How, and Why dimensions of storyworlds, they do so based on the assumption that the patterns in question emanate from reasons for... actions performed by the person[s]... who designed the narrative in question.”
The capacity of AI to create, for instance, a semi-autobiographical novel such as Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield or reflections of the kind examined by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, remains questionable. The irreplaceability of the human narrator thus rests in having a lived history and real-time engagement with
the world.
