Toward Culturalized Generative AI for the Creative and Cultural Industries: Lessons from Adaptive Cultural Mediation

This paper argues that today’s mainstream generative AI models do not yet provide the level of culturalization required in the creative and cultural industries (CCIs). Debates on generative AI in cultural domains have focused primarily on productivity, innovation, intellectual property, labor disruption and bias. While these concerns are important, they do not fully capture a more basic issue: cultural production depends on forms of meaning that are historically situated, socially mediated and unevenly distributed across languages, communities and markets. In such contexts, fluency, safety and technical usefulness are not sufficient measures of system quality. The paper discusses how an existing line of thought from localization, cross-cultural design and culturalization research should be carried into the era of generative AI as explicit attention to cultural context, symbolic meaning and interpretive plurality. The CCIs provide a particularly revealing testbed for this claim because they expose the limits of generic AI systems in domains where value depends on tone, memory, symbolism and representation. To ground the argument, the article revisits earlier work on targeted narratives, personalization and adaptive cultural mediation across museums, heritage sites and pilgrimage routes, and uses recent exploratory attempts with widely used generative AI models to show what remains missing. On that basis, the article proposes a framework for culturalized generative AI and outlines an integrated research and governance agenda spanning AI, the humanities and cultural-sector practice.