Narratives of Tomorrow: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Encourage Tourist Support for Preservation in Tourism

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a powerful means of envisioning the future impacts of tourism destinations. Through two rounds of focus group discussions, three experimental studies, and two supplemental studies, this research conceptualized and evaluated two types of loss-framed AI narratives using both text and visuals: deprivation of a positive future and presence of a negative one. Our results demonstrate that AI narratives depicting the presence of a negative future are more effective in motivating tourists to support heritage preservation than those illustrating the deprivation of a positive future due to evoking fear. Furthermore, this research indicates the critical moderating role of temporal distance, revealing that AI narratives describing the presence of a negative future intensify fear and enhance tourists’ support for preservation in distant future scenarios. However, distant future narratives mitigate these observed effects. Our findings provide valuable implications for designing impactful conservation campaigns to promote sustainability in tourism.