From Animated Paintings to Social Robots: Embodied Generative AI, Algorithmic Governance and the Data-Based Mediation of Cultural Heritage at the Alfieri Museum

Digital technologies and data-based approaches do not only increase the amount of information available to institutions and the public, they also transform the conditions through which social reality is classified, made visible, ordered, interpreted and governed. This article examines this transformation through AI4Alfieri, a project developed in Italy, at the Luciano Gallino Laboratory of the University of Turin in collaboration with the Fondazione Centro di Studi Alfieriani in Asti, and devoted to generative AI for the mediation of Vittorio Alfieri’s life and work. Specifically, it presents a virtual conversational agent and one embodied in a social robot (Pepper or NAO). The project is analysed as a reflexive case study of a technology in the making, with autoethnographic elements. The empirical corpus comprises a development diary, code and design artefacts, prompts, logs, architectural diagrams and laboratory tests; the study does not evaluate effects on museum visitors. From analysis of the design process, the article advances the interpretive thesis that embodied generative AI makes cultural mediation a problem of distributed accountability: knowledge is governed by the corpus, speech by prompts and retrieval, action by deterministic policy, presence by the body, legitimacy by the institution, and auditability by infrastructures. The paper proposes an exploratory S0–S4 governance stack for embodied generative agents and formulates hypotheses for future research on how data-based cultural mediation may reallocate epistemic authority, institutional legitimacy and design responsibility.