AIrt Guide: Conversational AI as a Curiosity Scaffold in Art Museums

Abstract

This paper presents AIrt Guide, a conversational human-AI system designed to scaffold interpretive curiosity and creative meaning-making during art museum visits. Art engagement is inherently interpretive and creative, and AIrt Guide structures dialogue to support sustained observation, evidence-based reasoning, and elaborative perspective shifting during the act of viewing. Grounded in a mini-c framework of everyday creative cognition, the system implements two pedagogical conversational variations: Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) and Formal Analysis. Rather than delivering definitive interpretations, the system supports iterative meaning construction while preserving viewer agency and productive ambiguity. Findings from in-person workshops suggest that this form of conversational scaffolding promotes analytic depth and more explicit articulation of visual evidence. Overall, this work demonstrates the potential of conversational AI as a creativity support tool in cultural settings, augmenting everyday interpretive practice by expanding associative space without resolving meaning.