Not really ... it's more of an event scheduler that gives you challenges and positive events and some padding in between so you can recover after negative events.

They also have different scales for what types of events come when. For example, Casandra Classic aims for you to have 5 colonists. If you have less, you’ll get more opportunities to recruit. If you have more, raids get more violent and your colonists die easier.

The story teller is a very advanced and configurable difficulty scaling system that enables different styles of play. Mods even add in new story tellers to change the game focus entirely.

That's literally just scaling easy mode. But I recognize that not calling it that may have some good value in terms of player appreciation.

But the difficulty is separate from these characteristics.

Cassandra always tries to push you to 5 colonists. The events she chooses are separate from the difficulties or quality of the events.

The number of events / enemies are just knobs on the difficulty scale you can turn to create difficulty, and if you go too far back off. Lots of RPGs do the same thing, if an area is too easy increase enemies, if area is too hard decrease enemies, you can tune other stats too but fundamentally it's not really that different. The idea is to tune it so that the player feels like they are at the exact ideal power level, having a challenge but not frustratingly hard and not too easy either.

Roguelikes with random events have easy mode the same way, if they think you're falling behind the curve you're given events and powerups, they decrease if they think you're doing well. Because events are random this is easy to tune for the ideal difficulty.

I think most people respond much better to the idea of "storyteller" than "scaling difficulty" though, so it's an important innovation at least in terms of framing.

Are you sure it's always 5? On my playthrough I had no trouble growing to around 10. Didn't feel to be specifically limited to 5.

There's a difficulty slider alongside the storyteller.

They're not the same.

one could argue that the storyteller is just a different facet of the difficulty scaling system.

different narrators are more difficult than others.

As far as the whole 'intelligent AI' thing. Eh, not really. It's a (small) set of conditions that determines the timing of the next event, the difficulty/magnitude of the event, and whether or not the event will be positive/negative/neutral; plenty of games have had such systems without marketing them as 'intelligent AI storytellers'.

The game is great though. I've sunk way too many hours into it.

Left 4 Dead used a similar system and it was branded as a "AI storyteller"

It would basically look at what your team was doing. If a member decided to just go solo and do their own thing the AI would throw some mob that required a teammate to get rid of. If the team started having too many difficulties it would tone down the number of zombies and their placement. Etc

Think of "AI" as "game AI", not "machine learning". We have called NPC behavior "AI" in games even when they were simple decision trees.