CharacterChat: Supporting the Creation of Fictional Characters through Conversation and Progressive Manifestation with a Chatbot
This addresses the problem of character creation for writers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing chatbot and language model techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of supporting writers in creating fictional characters by developing CharacterChat, a chatbot that allows writers to progressively define and explore characters through guided prompts and open conversation, with user studies showing benefits in early stages but challenges due to conversational limitations.
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.