Drawing the Line: Where AI Guidance and Human Creativity Meet in Emotion-Driven Comic Storyboarding

2026-10-06

AI Summary

Generative AI often struggles to convey emotional authenticity in comic panel creation due to its limited understanding of nuanced human lived experiences. To address this limitation, this work introduces EmoToon, a technology probe that investigates emotion-guided mechanisms within human-AI collaboration, aiming to balance generative quality with user creative autonomy. The system integrates image generation models with human-computer co-creative interaction paradigms, enabling non-professional artists to compose and iteratively refine emotion-driven panel sketches. Empirical findings demonstrate that EmoToon significantly enhances both the emotional expressiveness and aesthetic quality of the resulting artwork; however, it concurrently diminishes users' perceived sense of creative ownership to some extent.

Abstract

While generative AI models can produce visually faithful artwork, they often fall short in conveying emotional authenticity--a key driver of human expression. In visual storytelling, particularly comic storyboarding, this gap becomes pronounced: effective storyboards require both technical knowledge (e.g., anatomical accuracy or scenic composition) and emotional insight (from lived experience). We explore how human-AI collaboration can support emotion-driven creativity, where the user's feelings guide generation and emotional resonance is the goal. We present EmoToon, a technology probe that helps non-professional artists generate sketch-like storyboards and iterate on visual ideas. In a controlled study with N=25 participants, we find that AI assistance significantly improves emotional expression, aesthetic quality, and exploration, but reduces users' creative ownership. Our findings offer broader insights for human-AI co-creation in the domain of comic storytelling, emphasizing balance between output quality and user freedom, and raising new challenges for image generation models in this domain.

Problem

• generative AI
• emotional authenticity
• comic storyboarding
• human-AI collaboration
• creative ownership

Innovation

• Human-AI Collaboration
• Emotion-Driven Creativity
• Comic Storyboarding
• Generative AI
• Technology Probe