ID.8
ID.8 is a multimodal authoring tool for people who have ideas for visual stories but not the training to write, illustrate, score, and edit them alone. The system keeps the human in charge while AI helps draft narrative beats, images, and audio across one continuous workflow.
Visual storytelling usually requires a stack of specialized skills: writing, image-making, sound design, sequencing, and editing. ID.8 collapses those steps into one authoring surface, so creators can keep momentum instead of jumping between disconnected AI tools.
Story writing, scene organization, image generation, and audio creation happen inside a single system.
The AI proposes narrative beats and assets, but people keep choosing, editing, and steering the direction.
The tool lowers the barrier for users who have ideas and domain knowledge, but not professional artistic training.
ID.8 is structured as three connected surfaces: generate the storyline, arrange scenes in a storyboard, then build visuals and audio inside each scene. The flow is intentionally sequential, but never locked down.
Storyline Creator: the author begins with intent, and the system proposes narrative beats to refine.
Storyboard: scenes can be sequenced, swapped, and rewritten without losing the broader story structure.
Scene Editor: visuals and audio are generated per scene, making iteration local instead of overwhelming.
Participants produced fantasy, sci-fi, slice-of-life, and other narrative styles without artistic backgrounds. What matters here is not just that the system generates assets, but that people use those assets to express a point of view.
Different visual directions emerged across users, genres, and tones rather than collapsing to one house style.
Stories are assembled through iterative proposals and author choices, not one-shot generation.
Users created stories spanning fantasy, science fiction, and everyday narrative scenarios, each with a distinct voice.
In the week-long deployment, participants spent hours iterating and produced multi-minute stories on their own devices.
The work is strongest when the AI expands options while the human keeps choosing what belongs in the story world.
ID.8 performed well as a usable, engaging creative tool. The weaker point was partnership: people found it helpful, but still experienced it more as a tool than as a collaborator.
Lab study: SUS 77.25, with strong enjoyment, exploration, and perceived worth.
Field study: week-long usage sustained exploration and satisfaction on participants’ own devices.
SUS landed at 77.25, putting the system comfortably in the “good usability” range for an exploratory creative tool.
Participants repeatedly used the system to explore directions they would not have sketched or composed manually.
Partnership and immersion lagged, suggesting the next generation should feel less like a utility and more like a coherent creative partner.
"It was really helpful for quickly iterating on new ideas and exploring potential broad strokes of the story."
P8 — lab study participant
"I didn't envision it like this, but this is really cool — sometimes it took me in a new direction."
P15 — on AI-driven creative redirection
ID.8 suggests a useful direction for creative AI: systems that expand what people can make without taking authorship away from them. The work also produced ten design guidelines for future co-creative systems, especially around clearer AI identity, iterative feedback, and smoother multimodal workflows. That makes this project relevant well beyond storytelling, to educational media, therapy tools, and any interface where AI should help create without taking over.
