Personal narrative and stream of consciousness: an AI approach

Abstract

The personal narrative is a construct said to embody personal identity and so influence thought and guide behavior. Therapists and coaches draw on such personal narratives to explain maladaptive thoughts and to foster clients’ insights. We combined artificial intelligence (AI) with stream-of-consciousness to make the latent construct of personal narrative explicit. Adult participants (n = 26) contributed 50 stream-of-consciousness thoughts, which along with demographic details and our prompts, were processed by ChatGPT-4 to create a personal narrative. Participants evaluated these AI-generated narratives for accuracy, surprise, and insightfulness, reporting high accuracy, surprise, and increased self-insight. Twenty-five of the 26 participants rated the narratives as ‘Completely Accurate’ or ‘Mostly Accurate’,19 rated the narratives as ‘Very Surprising’ or ‘Somewhat Surprising’, and 19 indicated that they learned something new about themselves. This suggests that AI can support self-discovery in therapy and coaching.