Allen Zadoff | Narrative AI Strategist & Trainer @ xAI
I design and evaluate Al systems that write, speak, and reason more like humans - with emotional fluency, story sense, and personality consistency.
After 15 years as an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and theater director, I transitioned into Al development to bridge human creativity with machine capability. At xAI, I train the Grok model's narrative and behavioral fluency, helping it understand structure, tone, and emotional nuance across creative domains.
I also build independent narrative-Al prototypes like Breaking Story, exploring how large-language models can analyze and generate story arcs with human-level insight.
My focus is on advancing Narrative Intelligence, teaching machines to understand story, emotion, and character while preserving human creativity.
Currently exploring senior Narrative AI and Product roles that bridge model design, personality behavior, and creative systems.
Breaking Story
Breaking Story is a prototype exploring how AI can understand and generate story structure with human-level nuance.
Built on a custom multi-phase prompt system totaling over 500 lines, Breaking Story combines a real-time story chat with a beat-by-beat generation engine. The chat prompt contains logic, progression rules, and formatting constraints to guide idea development. Then, in three structured stages, the system generates a full 15-beat outline based on narrative conventions, genre, and user intent, while using extracted and contextual data from the previous conversation.
Writers use it to:
Break through structure paralysis
Build strong foundations before writing
Solve the blank page problem
Generate professional outlines in minutes
Recent Work Highlights
xAI (Grok) – Train LLMs with a focus on personality and behavior, including narrative fluency, coherence, and character modeling
Breaking Story – AI-powered story engine prototype that turns rough ideas into structured outlines
CSUN Residency – Designed and taught human-AI collaboration in theater
West Coast Mind Hub – Built GPT-based tools for novelists, agents, and creators
Other Experiments
I’ve built a growing library of GPT Assistants for narrative tasks:
How I Think
The best AI tools don’t write for you. They help you write better, allowing you to develop your vision.
Storytelling involves intuition, emotional intelligence, and creative leaps only humans can make. But structure, beats, consistency—that’s where AI can shine.
My tools handle the heavy lifting, so writers can focus on what matters: character voice, emotional truth, and the magic that makes stories unforgettable.
About Allen Zadoff
I'm an award-winning author and narrative AI specialist working at the intersection
of structure, voice, and emotion—first in books and film, now in AI systems.
At xAI, I train Grok's narrative fluency and personality. I specialize in teaching
large language models story structure, emotional nuance, and user-centered
communication—especially in creative and character-driven domains.
Current Role: AI Trainer at xAI
Background: Novelist (Boy Nobody series, Kirkus Best YA of 2024), screenwriter,
Harvard-trained theater director
Approach: Systematize creative intuition into tools that support human writers
Vision: Pioneer narrative intelligence as a core capability in AI products
My writing background gives me something most AI developers lack, a deep understanding
of what writers actually struggle with. Story structure isn't just theory to me,
it's the difference between a script that sells and one that doesn't.
Connect
I’m based in Los Angeles and always open to:
Collaborations with AI labs, studios, or media companies
Consulting on AI tools for storytelling and narrative systems
Conversations with writers exploring creative AI
Email: allen@breakingstoryai.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/allenzadoff