{"id":"garden-forking-prompts","title":"The Garden of Forking Prompts: How Users Explore Narrative Space in Story Generation","authors":[{"given":"Advait","family":"Deshmukh"},{"given":"Nora","family":"Benedict"},{"given":"Melanie","family":"Walsh"},{"given":"Maria","family":"Antoniak"}],"first_public":"2026-09-13","date_note":"First arXiv version.","date_source":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14677","year":2026,"venue":"COLM 2026","paper_url":"https://openreview.net/forum?id=w6VGVCw4FF","arxiv":"2609.14677","code_url":"https://github.com/advaitdeshmukh/The-Garden-of-Forking-Prompts","category":"behavior","relationship":"uses","relationship_label":"Uses WildChat","dataset_version":"The yuntian-deng/WildChat-4.8M-Full release, filtered to 2,560,447 English prompt-response pairs with prompts of at least 20 words; one story-shape analysis uses WildChat-1M.","summary":"Introduces WildStories, containing 275,635 story prompts, and WildEdits, containing 24,291 reconstructed edit trees. The study follows revisions across separate conversations, organizes edits by direction and narrative target, and uses this framework to generate story-prompt variations for evaluation.","finding":"94.2% of prompts with an identified parent link to a different WildChat conversation, showing how story revisions span separate conversations.","evidence_url":"https://arxiv.org/html/2609.14677v1","evidence_note":"Sections 3–4: sampling, inferred users, and edit-tree construction. Sections 5–6: revisions and prompt permutation.","bibtex_key":"deshmukh2026forkingprompts","record_url":"https://yuntiandeng.com/wildchat/papers/garden-forking-prompts/","citation_title":"The Garden of Forking Prompts: How Users Explore Narrative Space in Story Generation","citation_type":"paper-conference","bibtex_type":"inproceedings","container_title":"Third Conference on Language Modeling","citation_url":"https://openreview.net/forum?id=w6VGVCw4FF","citation_year":2026,"citation_note":"COLM 2026 proceedings paper."}