PAUSE: Editable Strategy Artifacts for Long-Form Cultural Story Adaptation

Abstract:Generative AI systems increasingly mediate cultural adaptation, but their cultural decisions are often hidden inside prompts, transient model plans, or final prose. We study PAUSE (Pause-And-Update Strategy Editing), an intervention that exposes an editable adaptation strategy as a human control surface for cultural decisions in long-form story adaptation. The strategy is a structured artifact that can be inspected, edited, and then projected through downstream character, entity, and chapter-localization stages. In two Chinese-source serialized novels, we test whether human edits to this strategy propagate into chapter-level prose. Across 9 edited-vs-control chapter comparisons, judges select the edited-strategy output in all 9; a marker audit shows target markers in 8/9 edited outputs and 0/9 controls, with forbidden markers absent from edited outputs and present in all controls. We frame these results as a smoke-scale edit-adherence study, not a claim that the outputs are culturally authoritative or literary-quality improvements. PAUSE offers one practical way to make AI-mediated cultural adaptation more inspectable and contestable before decisions propagate through long-form generation.

6 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables. Accepted at the 1st Workshop on Culture x AI: Evaluating AI as a Cultural Technology, ICML 2026. Project page: this https URL

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY)

arXiv:2608.28633 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.28633v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.28633 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)