“There was a scribe, a priest and a thief”. Testing the potential of language models for the creation of curatorial narratives in an archaeological museum

n the cultural heritage sector, Artificial Intelligence can aid in the creation of narratives by enhancing human creativity and assisting cultural heritage professionals in crafting and developing stories. In this work we focus specifically on how large language models can support rather than replace curatorial expertise. While AI can generate content, crafting compelling narratives requires human understanding of narrative structures, cultural context, and thematic coherence. We present a platform that helps curators create interactive stories for museums through AI assistance, developed as part of the CHANGES project at the Egyptian Museum in Turin. The platform enables curatorial narrative creation with selective LLM support, connects stories to museum collections via semantic annotation, and facilitates translation to venue-specific technical formats. Rather than having LLMs generate complete stories, curators construct the narrative framework while using LLMs to transform structured scene descriptions into polished prose. Our evaluation with three state-of-the-art models across 147 scenes and in a real use-case scenario shows that current LLMs can effectively complete this constrained creative task, though all outputs still require human refinement. This curator-driven approach ensures that generated narratives maintain the accuracy and scholarly standards essential for cultural heritage contexts while benefiting from AI's linguistic capabilities.