CharacterChat: Supporting the Creation of Fictional Characters through Conversation and Progressive Manifestation with a Chatbot

Abstract

We present CharacterChat, a concept and chatbot to support writers in creating fictional characters. Concretely, writers progressively turn the bot into their imagined character through conversation. We iteratively developed CharacterChat in a user-centred approach, starting with a survey on character creation with writers (N=30), followed by two qualitative user studies (N=7 and N=8). Our prototype combines two modes: (1) Guided prompts help writers define character attributes (e.g. User: "Your name is Jane. "), including suggestions for attributes (e.g. Bot: "What is my main motivation?") and values, realised as a rule-based system with a concept network. (2) Open conversation with the chatbot helps writers explore their character and get inspiration, realised with a language model that takes into account the defined character attributes. Our user studies reveal benefits particularly for early stages of character creation, and challenges due to limited conversational capabilities. We conclude with lessons learned and ideas for future work.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools; Empirical studies in HCI.

Evaluating large-language-model chatbots to engage communities in large-scale design projects

“…Chatbots have also been utilized to facilitate design thinking through the empathy map method (Bittner and Shoury, 2019). An intriguing example is CharacterChat, a chatbot designed to assist writers in creating fictional characters (Schmitt and Buschek, 2021). However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, no studies have specifically examined the use of chatbots in urban design tasks.…”

A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants

“…Therefore, there is a natural one-to-many relationship between our writing stages and the cognitive processes of writing. topics and content [85,220]. In the planning phase, writers focus on organizing the structure and content outline.…”

“…In the creative context, the focus lies on imagination, artistic expression, and original storytelling. An intelligent writing assistant within this context can provide support for diverse creative endeavors, including writing lyrics [257], crafting metaphors [84], and offering inspiration and assistance for storytelling [187,220]. The journalistic context centers around factual reporting, news coverage, and effective communication of information to the public.…”

“…Likewise, second language writing can be difficult due to unfamiliar spelling and grammar rules [157] as well as vocabulary [112], and writing assistants can help by aiding in translation to ease the difficulty of writing in an unfamiliar language [112,112,157,277]. Lastly, feedback describes tasks that provide evaluative comments, such as customer reviews [13,63] and constructive responses [220].…”

Sparks: Inspiration for Science Writing using Language Models

“…If we acknowledge that language models are inherently biased based on their training data, we can start to envision how we might make use of that knowledge. For example, Schmitt and Buschek use chatbots as a way for story writers to develop characters, where writers progressively turn a bot into a specifc character [49]. A biased language model is providing a specifc perspective, and writers could make use of that perspective as a way to imagine their reader.…”