CharacterMeet: Supporting Creative Writers' Entire Story Character Construction Processes Through Conversation with LLM-Powered Chatbot Avatars
Abstract
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.
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AI has the potential to support a variety of creative writing activities and aspects of the creative writing process.
“Such research has demonstrated that AI has the potential to support a variety of creative writing activities and aspects of the creative writing process.”
From Where Do I 'Add the Egg'?: Exploring Agency and Ownership in AI Creative Co-Writing Systems (2026) · cites this paper as [48]
AI can generate character roles with diverse appearances and dialogue styles, assisting users in sparking creative ideas.
“AI can generate character roles with diverse appearances and dialogue styles [79], assisting users in sparking creative ideas.”
From Understanding Screenwriters' Practices, Attitudes, and Future Expectations in Human-AI Co-Creation (2025) · cites this paper as [79]
Cites
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“…they wrote in the systems’ interfaces [21, 71, 86, 120, 122, 139], by providing support for writers who wrote their texts separately from our interface (in Word), our tool provided less guidance on the writing approach writers should choose, allowing greater personalization through ambiguity [39].”
MethodA cognitive process theory of writing
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High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
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Quantifying the Creativity Support of Digital Tools through the Creativity Support Index
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“Instead, we compare the different factors of the CSI, which is the suggested method for comparing two different creativity support tools [19].”
BackgroundMethodWordcraft: Story Writing With Large Language Models
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Linxen, S., Sturm, C., Brühlmann, F., Cassau, V., Opwis, K., & Reinecke, K. (2021) · Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3411764.3445488 · Cited by 254 · see citing works
Mirowski, P., Mathewson, K. W., Pittman, J., & Evans, R. (2023) · Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3544548.3581225 · Cited by 240 · cited 1× · see citing works
“…and eye color), psychological (e.g., personality traits and ambitions), social (e.g., profession and social status), and story (i.e., both the character’s backstory [108, 116, 119, 131] and their role in the current story [35, 85, 119]) dimensions [11, 16, 27–29, 33, 50, 92, 108, 116, 119, 131].”
BackgroundTaleBrush: Sketching Stories with Generative Pretrained Language Models
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Social Dynamics of AI Support in Creative Writing
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Where to Hide a Stolen Elephant: Leaps in Creative Writing with Multimodal Machine Intelligence
Singh, N., Bernal, G., Savchenko, D., & Glassman, E. L. (2023) · ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · doi:10.1145/3511599 · Cited by 119 · see citing works
How level of realism influences anxiety in virtual reality environments for a job interview
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“In fact, studies on using large language model (LLM) creative support systems that allow various approaches for storytelling have observed creators adopting approaches where they converse with the systems about their characters or roleplay with them [99, 120, 139].”
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Human Creativity in the Age of LLMs: Randomized Experiments on Divergent and Convergent Thinking
Kumar, H., Vincentius, J., Jordan, E., & Anderson, A. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3706598.3714198 · Cited by 51 · see citing works
“Beyond performing tasks autonomously, LLMs can also be utilized to guide users through the conceptual spaces of creative thinking, serving as tools for ‘creativity support’ [1, 30, 46].”
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“This capability not only aids in managing and synthesizing vast amounts of data related to character attributes and storylines but also provides valuable inspiration for AI tools designed for game character creation and interaction.”
Understanding Screenwriters' Practices, Attitudes, and Future Expectations in Human-AI Co-Creation
Tang, Y., Li, H., Lan, M., Ma, X., & Qu, H. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3706598.3714120 · Cited by 18 · see citing works
“For instance, AI can generate character roles with diverse appearances and dialogue styles [79], assisting users in sparking creative ideas.”
Empowering Children’s AI Literacy Through Co-Creating Stories with LLM
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“However, despite these advancements in supporting writers, there are significant challenges and concerns regarding using GenAI in creative writing.”
Where Do I 'Add the Egg'?: Exploring Agency and Ownership in AI Creative Co-Writing Systems
Carrera, D., Thomas-Mitchell, J., & Wigdor, D. (2026) · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3772318.3791952 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
“…at creative writing, there has been research on new techniques to support story writing [33, 80], playwriting [46], character development [56], prewriting [75], non-linear story writing (also known as ‘multiverse’) [27], worldbuilding [14], cartoon-captioning [35], and feedback…”
Understanding Screenwriters' Practices, Attitudes, and Future Expectations in Human-AI Co-Creation
Tang, Y., Li, H., Lan, M., Ma, X., & Qu, H. (2025) · arXiv · Cited by 18 · see citing works
Where Do I 'Add the Egg'?: Exploring Agency and Ownership in AI Creative Co-Writing Systems
Carrera, D., Thomas-Mitchell, J., & Wigdor, D. (2025) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.15440
- Authors
- Qin, H. X., Jin, S., Gao, Z., Fan, M., & Hui, P.
- Affiliations
- The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) (CN)
- Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HK)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2024-05-11
- Pages
- 1-19
- OpenAlex
- W4396832314
- Cited by
- 82
- References
- 18
- Citations by year
- 2026: 27 · 2025: 53 · 2024: 2
- FWCI
- 32.04
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Rare & Special e-Zone (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design › Digital Media and Visual Art
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Visual Arts and Performing Arts › Artistic and Creative Research
- Keywords
- character construction, creative writing, large language models, character visualization, immersion, writing support tools
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