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

Visitors to cultural heritage sites often encounter official information, while local people's unofficial stories remain invisible. To explore generative AI's potential in assisting individuals to access local narratives, we conducted a workshop with 20 participants, 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 generative AI's strengths in illuminating, amplifying, and reinterpreting personal narratives. However, the AI 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.