<![CDATA[Tourism villages in Indonesia increasingly promote themselves without journalists, agencies or tourism offices standing between them and their publics, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) now offers to write and picture that promotion for them. This community service article reports and critically reflects on a one-day workshop held on 4 June 2026 in Kemuning, a tea-growing tourism village on the western slope of Mount Lawu, Karanganyar, Central Java. Twenty social media account holders from nine tourism and small-business sectors, working with the village tourism awareness group (Pokdarwis), learned prompting for text, AI-assisted visual and audiovisual production, and an ethics protocol on disclosure, copyright and fact verification, and then produced and presented their own promotional content. The programme was examined through qualitative description, authentic assessment of participants' products and a social-semiotic reading of the materials. Participants, several of whom had never used AI, produced video, carousel and single-post content, and the speakers selected five works as exemplary. Reading the outputs closely revealed a further, less visible result. Generative AI turns each account holder into a village spokesperson whose first audience is a model trained largely elsewhere, and in the samples examined the outputs drifted toward a generic tourist imaginary that left Kemuning's own rituals and histories unspoken. The article argues that AI training for villages in the Global South should be designed as representational custodianship rather than tool efficiency, and it sets out measurable steps for follow-up.]]>
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