AutiHero: Engaging Parents in Creating Personalized, Multi-path Social Narratives for Autistic Children

Social narratives help autistic children understand and navigate social situations through stories. To ensure effective practice, however, they often require significant time and effort from parents in customizing the narrative materials and delivering repeated instructions on them. We present AutiHero, a generative AI (GenAI)-based social narrative system, which supports parents to create personalized, multi-path stories targeting specific behavior of their autistic children, while enabling them to explore behavioral choices and causal consequences together in reading. A two-week deployment study with 16 autistic child-parent dyads showed that parents actively created, adapted, and read stories with their children, with increased confidence in everyday behavioral guidance. Our work contributes real-world-contextualized text+image content creation approaches harnessing GenAI, ensuring user-aligned application in sensitive contexts involving autistic children and their parents.