“They all look mad with each other”: Understanding the needs and preferences of children and parents in AI-generated images for stories

Stories play an important part in children’s daily life—they aid literacy and learning, foster creativity and imagination, and create opportunities for children to connect with others. Visual content, such as illustrations and images, especially enhance children’s understanding and engagement with stories, as well as their interactions with others through reading or storytelling. Our research explores how AI-generated images in stories influence interactions in story-related activities and what qualities children and parents value in these generated images for stories. We conducted a qualitative study with 13 groups of parents and children between the ages of 4 and 8, where we observed how children and parents interact over stories with AI-generated images, collected their preferences, and interviewed parents about their needs and concerns on different qualities in generated images (e.g., visual style, consistency, authenticity, safety). Our work contributes empirical insights that can inform the design and evaluation of AI-empowered story related applications.