Volume 11 • Issue 2 • PP: 33–41 • 2026
When the Story Knows You: Personalisation, Interactivity, and Emotional Transportation in Human-AI Collaborative Narrative Experiences
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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 personalization 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 personalization 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.
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References
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