Ghost in the Shell: Intangible Mediation in Self-Guided Heritage Sites, from the Museumverse to the Conversational Agent

Museum dissemination has long been read through the tension between enlightenment and experience, yet the act of guiding a visitor is itself an in-tangible cultural-heritage practice: performed, transmitted between practitioners, and, increasingly, removed from its human carrier. A growing number of heritage sites operate self-guided, without on-site staff, displacing that practice onto signage, mobile applications, and, since 2022, conversational agents built on large language models. This paper adopts Jensen's Museumverse (a three-dimensional matrix of user positions crossing experience versus enlightenment, technological versus non-technological mediation, and active versus passive participation) as its analytical model, and uses it to read a reconnaissance of 58 self-guided heritage sites across ten countries. Mapping the sites onto the matrix shows where automated mediation concentrates and where it leaves the space empty. We then focus on the conversational agent as the newest, and least accountable, carrier of the in-tangible practice: where it can move a site through the matrix, and where its risks (hallucination, opaque authority, uneven access, and ongoing upkeep) bear on the safeguarding of intangible heritage. We offer the mapping as a shared frame for comparative work on automated heritage mediation in the conversational-agent era.