Scaffolding Recursive Divergence and Convergence in Story Ideation

2025-07-04

AI Summary

Existing AI-based Creative Support Tools (CSTs) struggle to model the recursive, nested interplay between divergent thinking (exploring diverse possibilities) and convergent thinking (synthesizing coherent solutions) inherent in human creativity. This paper introduces Reverger—a novel interactive AI tool for story creation—that pioneers recursive divergence over high-level creative directions and progressive convergence toward integrated narrative outcomes. Its core contribution is a recursively structured support mechanism enabling iterative refinement across multiple levels of abstraction, empowering users to flexibly modulate the pace and granularity of ideation at high-order semantic levels. A user study demonstrates that, compared to baseline CSTs, Reverger significantly enhances both the diversity and novelty of creative directions (p < 0.01), while simultaneously improving users’ sense of control and their perceived satisfaction with developable creative outputs.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Natural Language Processing: Code Generation / Program Synthesis from Natural Language

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Assisted, interactive, and conversational search
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications

Abstract

Human creative ideation involves both exploration of diverse ideas (divergence) and selective synthesis of explored ideas into coherent combinations (convergence). While processes of divergence and convergence are often interleaved and nested, existing AI-powered creativity support tools (CSTs) lack support for sophisticated orchestration of divergence and convergence. We present Reverger, an AI-powered CST that helps users ideate variations of conceptual directions for modifying a story by scaffolding flexible iteration between divergence and convergence. For divergence, our tool enables recursive exploration of alternative high-level directions for modifying a specific part of the original story. For convergence, it allows users to collect explored high-level directions and synthesize them into concrete variations. Users can then iterate between divergence and convergence until they find a satisfactory outcome. A within-subject study revealed that Reverger permitted participants to explore more unexpected and diverse high-level directions than a comparable baseline. Reverger users also felt that they had more fine-grained control and discovered more effort-worthy outcomes.

Problem

• Supports flexible iteration between divergence and convergence in story ideation
• Enables recursive exploration of alternative high-level story directions
• Facilitates synthesis of diverse ideas into coherent story variations

Innovation

• Scaffolds recursive divergence and convergence iteration
• Enables recursive exploration of story variations
• Synthesizes explored directions into concrete outcomes