Support for story character construction is as essential as characters are for stories. Building upon past research on early character construction stages, we explore how conversation with chatbot avatars embodying characters powered by more recent technologies could support the entire character construction process for creative writing. Through a user study (N=14) with creative writers, we examine thinking and usage patterns of CharacterMeet, a prototype system allowing writers to progressively manifest characters through conversation while customizing context, character appearance, voice, and background image. We discover that CharacterMeet facilitates iterative character construction. Specifically, participants, including those with more linear usual approaches, alternated between writing and personalized exploration through visualization of ideas on CharacterMeet while visuals and audio enhanced immersion. Our findings support research on iterative creative processes and the growing potential of personalizable generative AI creativity support tools. We present design implications for leveraging chatbot avatars in the creative writing process.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642105
While effective for recording and sharing experiences, traditional in-context writing tools are relatively passive and unintelligent, serving more like instruments rather than companions. This reduces primary task (e.g., travel) enjoyment and hinders high-quality writing. Through formative study and iterative development, we introduce PANDALens, a Proactive AI Narrative Documentation Assistant built on an Optical See-Through Head Mounted Display that supports personalized documentation in everyday activities. PANDALens observes multimodal contextual information from user behaviors and environment to confirm interests and elicit contemplation, and employs Large Language Models to transform such multimodal information into coherent narratives with significantly reduced user effort. A real-world travel scenario comparing PANDALens with a smartphone alternative confirmed its effectiveness in improving writing quality and travel enjoyment while minimizing user effort. Accordingly, we propose design guidelines for AI-assisted in-context writing, highlighting the potential of transforming them from tools to intelligent companions.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642320
The growing availability of generative AI technologies such as large language models (LLMs) has significant implications for creative work. This paper explores twofold aspects of integrating LLMs into the creative process – the divergence stage of idea generation, and the convergence stage of evaluation and selection of ideas. We devised a collaborative group-AI Brainwriting ideation framework, which incorporated an LLM as an enhancement into the group ideation process, and evaluated the idea generation process and the resulted solution space. To assess the potential of using LLMs in the idea evaluation process, we design an evaluation engine and compared it to idea ratings assigned by three expert and six novice evaluators. Our findings suggest that integrating LLM in Brainwriting could enhance both the ideation process and its outcome. We also provide evidence that LLMs can support idea evaluation. We conclude by discussing implications for HCI education and practice.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642414
Novice students in law courses or students who encounter legal education face the challenge of acquiring specialized and highly concept-oriented knowledge. Structured and persuasive writing combined with the necessary domain knowledge is challenging for many learners. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have shown the potential to support learners in complex writing tasks. To test the effects of ML-based support on students' legal writing skills, we developed the intelligent writing support system \textit{LegalWriter}. We evaluated the system's effectiveness with 62 students. We showed that students who received intelligent writing support based on their errors wrote more structured and persuasive case solutions with a better quality of legal writing than the current benchmark. At the same time, our results demonstrated the positive effects on the students' writing processes.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642743