Article Hey Siri, tell me a story: Digital storytelling and AI authorship Sarah Thorne Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada Abstract Surveying narrative applications of artificial intelligence in film, games and interactive fiction, this article imagines the future of artificial intelligence (AI) authorship and explores trends that seek to replace human authors with algorithmically generated narrative. While experimental works that draw on text generation and natural language processing have a rich history, this article focuses on commercial applications of AI narrative and looks to future applications of this technology. Video games have incorporated AI and procedural generation for many years, but more recently, new applications of this technology have emerged in other media. Director Oscar Sharp and artist Ross Goodwin, for example, generated significant media buzz about two short films that they produced which were written by their AI screenwriter. It’s No Game (2017), in particular, offers an apt commentary on the possibility of replacing striking screenwriters with AI authors. Increasingly, AI agents and virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant are incorporated into our daily lives. As concerns about their eavesdropping circulate in news media, it is clear that these companions are learning a lot about us, which raises concerns about how our data might be employed in the future. This article explores current applications of AI for storytelling and future directions of this technology to offer insight into issues that have and will continue to arise as AI storytelling advances. Keywords Artificial intelligence, authorship, narrative, storytelling, video games, virtual assistants Introduction In recent years, the television, film and video game entertainment industries have experimented with new forms of digital storytelling. The most familiar form revives the once popular genre of Corresponding author: Sarah Thorne, Department of English, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Arts and Administration Building, Room A3026, St. John’s, NL A1C 5S7, Canada. Email: sthorne@mun.ca Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 1–16 ª The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1354856520913866 journals.sagepub.com/home/con