"I Recall the Past": Exploring How People Collaborate with Generative AI to Create Cultural Heritage Narratives

TL;DR

This study explores how people use Generative AI, specifically Stable Diffusion, to create visual narratives of cultural heritage sites, revealing strengths in storytelling and highlighting challenges like bias and accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a workshop-based method for analyzing personal cultural narratives with GenAI and proposes strategies to improve AI accuracy and bias mitigation in cultural heritage contexts.

Findings

GenAI supports personal storytelling and reinterpretation of cultural sites.

Limitations include difficulty in detailed depiction and bias, especially for unfamiliar sites.

Recommendations include prompt engineering and dataset curation to improve accuracy.

Abstract

Visitors to cultural heritage sites often encounter official information, while local people's unofficial stories remain invisible. To explore expression of local narratives, we conducted a workshop with 20 participants utilizing Generative AI (GenAI) to support visual narratives, asking them to use Stable Diffusion to create images of familiar cultural heritage sites, as well as images of unfamiliar ones for comparison. The results revealed three narrative strategies and highlighted GenAI's strengths in illuminating, amplifying, and reinterpreting personal narratives. However, GenAI showed limitations in meeting detailed requirements, portraying cultural features, and avoiding bias, which were particularly pronounced with unfamiliar sites due to participants' lack of local knowledge. To address these challenges, we recommend providing detailed explanations, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning AI models to reduce uncertainties, using objective references to mitigate inaccuracies from participants' inability to recognize errors or misconceptions, and curating datasets to train AI models capable of accurately portraying cultural features.