What if a fish got drunk? Exploring the plausibility of machine-generated fictions

Within the WHIM project, we study fictional ideation: processes for automatically inventing, assessing and presenting fictional ideas. Here we examine the foundational notion of the plausibility of fictional ideas, by performing an empirical study to surface the factors that affect judgements of plausibility. Our long term aim is to formalise a computational method which captures some intuitive notions of plausibility and can predict how certain types of people will assess the plausibility of certain types of fictional ideas. This paper constitutes a first firm step towards this aim.