SAGA: Collaborative Storytelling with GPT-3

When friends live across different time zones, have incompatible work schedules, or have different levels of access to technology, synchronous communication becomes infeasible. To address this challenge, we developed a web application that allows friends to asynchronously collaborate creatively. In this application, multiple people can contribute to the writing of a story, told partially by a natural language AI system. By offloading some of the creative work to the AI, the human writers have the opportunity to also act as readers, being surprised by new events in the story. To gain preliminary insights into the experience of using this system, we conducted an informal pilot study over a span of 5 days. Through this process, we learned that storytelling with an AI system can encourage roleplay, it can be a cathartic experience, and it is curiosity-driven. Our recommendations for future research include (1) investigating new turn-taking strategies, and clearly communicating turns through the interface, (2) providing guidance for the prompt-writing process, perhaps through editable prompt templates, and (3) conducting a thorough evaluation of the system with friend groups of various sizes and timezones.