When the Story Knows You: Personalisation, Interactivity, and

Emotional Transportation in Human-AI Collaborative Narrative

Experiences

Nurdaulet Karabayev1,* Sholpan Baumuratova2

1 Eurasian National University, Kazakhstan

2 Department of Computer Science, L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Astana, Kazakhstan

Received: December 13, 2026 Revised: February 01, 2026 Accepted: March 11, 2026 ⋆ Corresponding author

ABSTRACT

Stories have always been the primary medium through which human beings share emotions, build empathy, and

make sense of experience. The emergence of large language models capable of generating coherent, contextually rich

narratives raises a fundamental question for human-computer interaction: when a story is generated by a machine,

does it still carry the emotional weight and imaginative pull of one written by a human, and can the design of the

interaction itself amplify or diminish that pull? This paper reports a controlled within-subjects experiment in which

thirty-six participants read or actively co-shaped stories produced by a large language model under four conditions

that crossed two levels of interactivity—passive reading versus branching-choice interaction—with two levels of

personalisation—generic narrative versus one adapted to the participant’s stated interests and preferences. Emotional

engagement was measured through narrative transportation, positive and negative affect, sense of narrative agency,

trust in the AI narrator, and perceived story quality. The study finds that both interactivity and personalisation

independently increase emotional transportation, and that their combined presence produces an amplified effect that

is larger than either factor alone, while trust in the AI narrator emerges as a partial mediator of the personalisation

advantage. Individual differences in baseline narrative engagement propensity predict the magnitude of benefit from

the most engaging condition, providing actionable guidance for adaptive storytelling interface design.

Keywords: AI storytelling Narrative transportation Large language models Emotional engagement Interactive

narrative Personalisation Affective response Human-AI collaboration Human-computer interaction

1. INTRODUCTION

Reading a compelling story induces a state of absorption that

researchers have termed narrative transportation: a holistic

experience in which attention, emotion, and mental imagery

converge on the story world, temporarily displacing awareness

of the reader’s actual surroundings [1]. Transportation

is not merely enjoyment; it predicts belief change, empathy

for characters, and durable memory for narrative content.

For decades, narrative transportation has been studied in the

context of human-authored texts. The arrival of generative

language models capable of producing extended, coherent,

emotionally inflected prose in seconds reopens these questions

from an HCI perspective: can algorithmically generated

narrative achieve comparable levels of transportation, and

how does the interaction design surrounding the story shape

the emotional experience?

These questions are practical as well as theoretical. Language

model-based storytelling systems are being deployed