One Kiss: Emojis as Agents of Genre Flux in Generative Comics
This addresses the problem of rigid prompt-based interactions in generative AI for comic creators, offering an incremental approach to enhance creative flow.
The paper tackles the trade-off between control and creativity in generative AI for visual storytelling by introducing One Kiss, a co-creative comic generation system that uses emoji-based 'Affective Steering' to enable 'Genre Flux', with a preliminary study (N = 6) suggesting it reframes users from prompt engineers to narrative directors.
Generative AI has made visual storytelling widely accessible, yet current prompt-based interactions often force users into a trade-off between precise control and creative flow. We present One Kiss, a co-creative comic generation system that introduces "Affective Steering". Instead of writing text prompts, users guide the tone of their story through emoji inputs, whose semantic ambiguity becomes a resource rather than a limitation. Unlike traditional text-to-image tools that rely on explicit descriptions, One Kiss uses a dual-stream input in which users define structural pacing by sketching panel frames and set atmospheric tone by pairing keywords with emojis. This mechanism enables "Genre Flux," where emotional inputs accumulate across panels and gradually shift the genre of a story. A preliminary study (N = 6) suggests that this soft steering approach may reframe the user's role from prompt engineer to narrative director, with ambiguity serving as a source of creative surprise rather than a loss of control.