From the dawn of time, storytelling has been the foundation of how we learn. Before we ever developed written language, we passed down knowledge through oral traditions, folklore, symbols, and cave paintings. It’s how hunters taught younger generations to track prey, how families shared wisdom across lifetimes, and how cultures preserved their values. Storytelling was our first teacher—and it still is.
Today, we’re witnessing a shift. Artificial intelligence, often seen as rigid and technical, is stepping into this deeply human space. It’s becoming a helpful co-creator, expanding the possibilities of how we simulate and shape narrative experiences. Especially in the world of learning experience design (LxD), AI is offering new tools to help designers build immersive, emotionally resonant environments that adapt to learners’ needs.
Let’s explore AI in elearning, specifically how it is supporting storytelling today, and what learning designers can take from it.
AI Dungeon – Fantasy Adventures
Originally developed by Nick Walton in 2019, AI Dungeon began as a text-based, AI-powered dungeon crawling game that let users type anything they wanted and watch a story unfold in real time. The tool uses natural language generation to build expansive, open-ended narratives, responding to user input with flexibility and emotional range.
What made it go viral wasn’t just the fantasy setting, it was the freedom. Players could create any kind of character, world, or conflict and explore infinite outcomes without being constrained by pre-written scripts. Whether it was befriending a dragon or becoming a time-traveling pirate, AI Dungeon let people engage with the story as a co-creator rather than a passive reader.
For learning designers, AI Dungeon demonstrates how open-ended, choice-driven storytelling can promote curiosity, intrinsic motivation, and exploration. It’s a sandbox model that gives learners narrative agency, an essential ingredient in designing adaptive scenarios, simulations, or problem-based elearning. The system doesn’t just react to input, it builds a world around it, encouraging critical thinking and creativity.
Boords – Storyboard AI
Boords is a popular AI-powered storyboard generator originally designed for creative professionals in film, animation, and advertising. However, its robust toolset makes it a valuable resource for learning experience designers looking to visually structure training modules, video lessons, or interactive scenarios.
Users enter a text prompt or upload a script, and Boords generates visual storyboard panels complete with consistent characters, camera direction, and scene sequencing.
Boords offers AI-powered text-to-panel generation, character consistency, and collaborative tools that make it useful for learning designers despite being built for videography and animation. It allows for fast visual prototyping of learner journeys or scenarios, reducing the need for complex tools. Designers can use Boords to align early with stakeholders by visualizing abstract ideas like workplace challenges, while AI-assisted shot suggestions help communicate emotional tone, such as empathy or urgency, before full production.
While not created with LXD in mind, Boords allows teams to test and refine learning flow visually, making it easier to focus on narrative clarity and emotional engagement when creating engaging learning experiences.
ChatGPT – Dialogue Assistant
ChatGPT, created by OpenAI, is a conversational AI that responds to natural language prompts with context-aware output. For learning experience designers, it’s a practical tool for drafting dialogue, building instructional content, and simulating learner interactions in a variety of contexts—all key components in elearning development.
Designers can use ChatGPT to explore different tones, model decision points in role-play scenarios, generate alternative responses without manually scripting every variation, and create visuals in varying styles to support the story. It’s especially useful during early design phases, where speed and flexibility are key to shaping content. ChatGPT can also be used to prototype different branching narrative paths. Although it doesn’t support long-term character memory, ChatGPT helps designers create learning materials that feel fluid, realistic, and ultimately support a more engaging learning experience.
Charisma.ai – AI-Powered Branching Narratives
In a BBC-backed workshop, writer Alys Metcalf was introduced to Charisma.ai, a tool that allows users to create interactive, emotionally responsive stories where characters remember, react, and evolve based on user choices. In just two days, she built a branching narrative about an artist manager whose client had gone missing before a concert; each of the player’s choices affected whether or not their client performed.
Charisma stands out for its sentiment analysis and memory features, allowing characters to shift tone or perspective based on how users interact with them. Designers can script personality traits, relationship dynamics, and emotional boundaries, and the tool’s natural language interface gives learners the freedom to engage in unscripted conversation.
For learning experience design, Charisma is more than a storytelling platform, it’s a training ground for empathy. In simulations involving ethics, counseling, management, or patient care, the emotional nuance and responsiveness of the platform create opportunities for reflective, personalized elearning. It opens the door for learners to directly involve themselves in the narrative by engaging in meaningful, sometimes uncomfortable dialogue that mirrors real interpersonal challenges.
IdeaMap AI – Structuring Personalized Learning Narratives
IdeaMap is an AI-enhanced visual brainstorming platform that helps teams generate, organize, and refine ideas in mind-map form. It uses OpenAI for idea generation, provides collaboration features, and includes visual mapping support.
For learning designers, IdeaMap can serve as a dynamic narrative-planning tool. By inputting learning outcomes and scenario prompts, teams can use the generated mind maps to structure ideas for branching narratives and plot character arcs, making story logic visible and editable before scripting or storyboarding.
This visual, collaborative format is especially useful during early-stage curriculum design or scenario planning. For example, a team building a leadership training module could use IdeaMap to sketch out multiple learner pathways. Each path could branch into dialogue moments, ethical decisions, or team reactions, giving the designer a top-down view of complexity before diving into production. IdeaMap supports both creativity and alignment, making it easier for teams to refine story-driven learning at scale.
Conclusion: What Learning Designers Can Take Away
Each of these tools, whether building fantasy quests, workplace dialogue, or immersive simulations, shows how AI can deepen the emotional and narrative dimensions of learning. For learning experience designers, it allows us to design emotionally responsive learning experiences that give learners agency, explore diverse storytelling, offer opportunities for reflection, and expand our horizon in regards to the lessons we can deliver through nimble storytelling.
As AI in elearning continues to evolve, we have the opportunity to shape it–and ensure the stories we build are meaningful, engaging, and deeply human.
Interested in co-creating a learning experience of your own? Let’s connect.