Objective/Meaning  Under the background of the in-depth promotion of the rural revitalization strategy, the rural culture is facing the triple challenges: difficulties in sustained inheritance, effective dissemination, and practical transformation. This study aimed to explore how to effectively deal with the above problems with the help of the new intelligent media of AI-generated digital humans to promote the digital protection, dissemination and innovative transformation of rural culture.

Methods/Procedures  Based on the three-dimensional empowerment framework of “expression–participation–co-construction”, three paths of narrative generation, situational interaction, and user co-creation were proposed as the key mechanisms, through which AI digital humans contributed to the rural cultural revitalization. Then, their roles in the cultural content supply, user-driven transformation, and embedded platform processes were explored. The four representative cases were analyzed in depth: Quanzhou’s “Little Xun Girl”, Qufu’s “AI Disciple Guide”, Guangxi’s “Liu Sanjie AI Assistant”, and Beijing Tongzhou’s “AI Village Secretary + Luxiaohe”.

Results/Conclusions  The study found that: through the visual expression, semantic interaction and emotional co-creation mechanism, AI digital humans could alleviate the structural deficiencies of rural culture, namely insufficient expressability, low public engagement, and weak industrial conversion, and demonstrate the potential in embedding into the functional workflows such as guide-commerce and publicizing-question answering. In the future, the efforts should focus on improving the level of system integration, platform coupling, and institutional support, in order to promote the cross-contextual transformation of rural cultural value and the internal circulation of digital ecology.