Sicilian Heritage Identity: Between Stereotype and AI-Based Knowledge

The paper investigates how artificial intelligence can be used to visualize and analyze the collective imaginary of a place, focusing on the representation of Sicily through textual descriptions. By applying text-to-image AI models to literary excerpts, the research aims to make explicit the intangible and often stereotypical mental images associated with the Sicilian landscape. The methodology combines textual analysis of selected novels with iterative image generation, examining recurring visual patterns and the influence of lexical structures on the output. Results show that AI tends to reproduce dominant visual archetypes (e.g., horizon lines, central compositions, recurring elements such as sea, boats, or rural landscapes), while struggling to interpret syntactic relationships and complex semantic nuances. The study highlights both the potential of AI as a tool for exploring cultural perception and its limitations in translating abstract, narrative-based descriptions into coherent visual representations.