AI storytelling across media: synthetic agency and the force vectors of narrative world-making

Artificial intelligence is reshaping narrative forms and content across the creative industries, transforming how stories are conceived, produced, distributed, and experienced. This article maps dominant framings in high-impact scholarship (2020–2025) through a citation-informed targeted review of Scopus and Web of Science records, focusing on the most influential discourses shaping the field. Selection and screening procedures are reported with an informed flow diagram. The 100 most-cited records per database were retrieved, de-duplicated, and screened against eligibility. 37 studies met inclusion criteria. The synthesis combines discourse analysis with a grounded theory-informed constant comparative method in Atlas.ti to identify dominant framings. Findings point to a predominantly techno-optimistic orientation, tempered by concerns about opacity, bias, homogenization, and attribution. Four force vectors emerge from the literature: synthetic participation, as AI expands from instrument to embodied narrative and social agent; redistributed authorship, as creative labor, authority, and accountability are dispersed across humans, systems, and infrastructures; adaptive procedural storytelling, as narrative becomes increasingly multilayered, scalable, and responsive to interaction and context; and personalized affective governance, as storytelling is modulated through data-driven customization and emotional engagement under opaque and asymmetric conditions of power. In conclusion, according to the most impactful literature, synthetic narrative participation is emerging as a multidimensional agent of unprecedented relevance in the creative industries. By operating across diegetic, performative, and emotional dimensions—and acquiring embodied forms through robots and interfaces—AI is increasingly positioned not merely as a tool, but as a narrative and social agent. This phenomenon marks a fundamental ontological shift: AI intervenes and participates —while remaining an object— in the construction of human fictions, realities and imaginaries.