CRAFTJAI: LLM-Enhanced Generative AI for Gamified Mood Journals

Mood journals support emotional self-reflection and awareness, but sustaining user motivation remains a challenge. CRAFTJAI, a gamification-driven AI framework, enhances the journaling experience by integrating generative AI, transforming diary entries into AI-generated visual mood characters to make the process more interactive and expressive. By incorporating gamification principles from Self-Determination Theory and the Octalysis model, CRAFTJAI emphasizes motivation and personalization to encourage long-term engagement. It employs LLMs for mood analysis and character generation, while LoRA fine-tuning enhances text-to-image synthesis, improving visual coherence and emotional expressiveness. The evaluation assessed five criteria: unpredictability and curiosity, diary alignment, style consistency, meaning and calling, and ownership and possession, demonstrating an 8% overall improvement over the baseline. The most significant gains were observed in diary alignment and style consistency, validating the effectiveness of fine-tuning in enhancing emotional representation and visual coherence. A real-world study further evaluated engagement across five key metrics: anticipation, motivation to collect, sense of accomplishment, community sharing, and long-term engagement, all mapped to gamification principles. Results strongly supported the fine-tuned method, with all metrics surpassing 80%, confirming its effectiveness in sustaining user motivation. Future work will focus on refining the representation of negative mood characters and expanding customization options to improve user experience. These findings highlight the potential of generative AI and gamification in enhancing motivation in mood journaling.