Crafting Hanzi as Narrative Bridges: An AI Co-Creation Workshop for Elderly Migrants

2025-07-02

AI Summary

This study addresses the narrative marginalization of urban elderly migrants—particularly Chinese cohorts—whose lived experiences remain difficult to articulate. We propose an AI-augmented co-creative narrative methodology integrating offline oral history workshops with hanzi (Chinese character) visualisation practices. Under human facilitation, participants reconstruct fragmented migration memories into tangible, visual narratives by physically reassembling seal-script characters suggested by large language models. Crucially, AI functions solely as a supportive medium—not a content generator—thereby circumventing digital literacy barriers and preserving narrative agency. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that the approach significantly enhances cultural expression, intergenerational memory transmission, and socio-emotional connectedness among low-digital-literacy elderly migrants. By centering human authorship and contextual meaning-making, this work extends the boundaries of human–AI collaboration in socially inclusive, humanities-oriented technology design.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: AI for Accessibility
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Architectures and workflows that use LLMs for crowd work
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

This paper explores how older adults, particularly aging migrants in urban China, can engage AI-assisted co-creation to express personal narratives that are often fragmented, underrepresented, or difficult to verbalize. Through a pilot workshop combining oral storytelling and the symbolic reconstruction of Hanzi, participants shared memories of migration and recreated new character forms using Xiaozhuan glyphs, suggested by the Large Language Model (LLM), together with physical materials. Supported by human facilitation and a soft AI presence, participants transformed lived experience into visual and tactile expressions without requiring digital literacy. This approach offers new perspectives on human-AI collaboration and aging by repositioning AI not as a content producer but as a supportive mechanism, and by supporting narrative agency within sociotechnical systems.

Problem

• AI-assisted co-creation for elderly migrants' personal narratives
• Expressing fragmented memories through Hanzi and AI collaboration
• Enhancing narrative agency without requiring digital literacy

Innovation

• AI-assisted co-creation for elderly migrants
• Hanzi symbolic reconstruction with LLM
• Soft AI presence supports narrative agency