One Kiss: Emojis as Agents of Genre Flux in Generative Comics

TL;DR

One Kiss introduces a novel comic generation system where users guide story tone through emojis, enabling genre shifts and enhancing creative control via affective steering, contrasting traditional explicit prompt methods.

Contribution

The paper presents 'Affective Steering' using emojis for narrative control, allowing genre flux and a new co-creative paradigm in AI-generated comics.

Findings

Emojis serve as effective affective inputs for storytelling.

Users experience a shift from prompt engineering to narrative directing.

Preliminary study indicates increased creative surprise and control.

Abstract

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.