Abstract

Heritage museums increasingly seek to support visitors as active meaning-makers during the visit and to extend that experience beyond the museum through personally meaningful takeaways. Generative AI (GenAI) may support this goal by helping visitors transform museum source material into personalized artifacts, but open-ended generation may weaken heritage linkage and obscure curatorial responsibility. This paper proposes two paired design principles for heritage GenAI: bounded creativity, which defines what visitors may change, and curatorial accountability, which defines how cultural limits are set, explained, and revised. We implemented these principles at the Lanting Calligraphy Museum in Shaoxing, China, through a visit-linked co-creation system. Visitors collected source images during the museum tour and later created a personalized 3D-printed takeaway through either a rule-based editor with predefined templates and options or a GenAI-mediated dialogue interface. A between-subjects field study with adult visitors (N = 60; 20 per condition) compared conventional consumption (a standard tour and souvenir), rule-based co-creation, and GenAI-mediated co-creation. Both co-creation pathways improved cultural engagement, perceived connection to heritage sources, personal meaning and self-expression, and psychological ownership compared with conventional consumption. The GenAI-mediated pathway produced further gains in cultural engagement, personal meaning, self-expression, and psychological ownership. Still, it did not reliably increase perceived connection to heritage sources beyond that of the rule-based pathway. These findings suggest that the GenAI pathway added value mainly on personal authenticity and psychological ownership, by helping visitors articulate and revise intentions within accountable cultural boundaries; its incremental effect on heritage-linked authenticity remains undetermined at this sample size.

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