WHAT-IF -- Writing a Hero's Alternate Timeline through Interactive Fiction -- is a system that uses zero-shot meta-prompting to create branching narratives from a prewritten story. Played as an interactive fiction (IF) game, WHAT-IF lets the player choose between decisions that the large language model (LLM) GPT-4 generates as possible branches in the story. Starting with an existing linear plot as input, a branch is created at each key decision taken by the main character. By meta-prompting the LLM to consider the major plot points from the story, the system produces coherent and well-structured alternate storylines. WHAT-IF stores the branching plot tree in a graph which helps it to both keep track of the story for prompting and maintain the structure for the final IF system. A video demo of our system can be found here: https://youtu.be/8vBqjqtupcc.

翻译：WHAT-IF——通过交互式小说书写英雄的替代时间线——是一个利用零样本元提示技术，从预先写好的故事中生成分支叙事的系统。该系统以交互式小说（IF）游戏的形式运行，允许玩家在大型语言模型（LLM）GPT-4 生成的可能故事分支选项中进行选择。系统以一个现有的线性情节作为输入，在主角做出的每个关键决策处创建一个分支。通过元提示LLM考虑故事中的主要情节节点，系统能够生成连贯且结构良好的替代故事线。WHAT-IF 将分支情节树存储在一个图结构中，这既有助于在提示时跟踪故事进展，也为最终的IF系统维持了结构框架。我们系统的视频演示可在此处查看：https://youtu.be/8vBqjqtupcc。