Style Over Story: A Process-Oriented Study of Authorial Creativity in Large Language Models

Evaluations of large language models (LLMs)' creativity have focused primarily on the quality of their outputs rather than the processes that shape them. This study takes a process-oriented approach, drawing on narratology to examine LLMs as computational authors. We introduce constraint-based decision-making as a lens for authorial creativity. Using controlled prompting to assign authorial personas, we analyze the creative preferences of the models. Our findings show that LLMs consistently emphasize Style over other elements, including Character, Event, and Setting. By also probing the reasoning the models provide for their choices, we show that distinctive profiles emerge across models and argue that our approach provides a novel systematic tool for analyzing AI's authorial creativity.