Museum-Grounded Generative-AI Guide Affordances and Heritage Stewardship Intention: Evidence from Jinghui

Museum-grounded generative-AI guides can extend heritage interpretation from information delivery to a participatory encounter that connects what visitors understand, experience, and intend to protect. Existing research, however, rarely distinguishes whether system affordances are associated with desirable outcomes, predictively important, or necessary for those outcomes to reach high levels. Drawing on the stimulus–organism–response framework, this study develops an integrated model of how dialogic, epistemic, social, cultural, adaptive, and participatory affordances relate to perceived heritage-value enhancement, flow, stewardship self-efficacy, and pro-heritage stewardship intention. Post-interaction evidence from adults reporting prior Jinghui use was examined through partial least squares structural equation modeling, artificial neural networks, a matched Basis-KAN predictive benchmark, and necessary-condition analysis. The findings identify outcome-specific profiles: responsive dialog is prominent for perceived value enhancement; visitor agency has the highest mean ANN importance for flow; epistemic transparency and cultural authenticity are closely ranked for self-efficacy; and perceived value enhancement and flow retain necessity evidence for stewardship intention. The direct value-enhancement–self-efficacy path is unsupported. Close coefficient differences do not establish superior design features, and ANN ranks vary across fitted runs. Comparison of nonlinear importance with held-out prediction further shows that a flexible representation does not automatically yield stronger predictive performance. By linking accountable system design to visitors’ meaning-making and stewardship motivation, this study provides an evidence-informed foundation for designing museum generative AI as public interpretive infrastructure that connects cultural accountability with informed participation in heritage stewardship.