Artificial intelligence (AI) provides novel technological conditions for the creative transformation and innovative development of China’s fine traditional legal culture. However, its significance extends far beyond instrumental applications such as artifact restoration, digital preservation, knowledge dissemination, and international communication. The core issue of AI’s involvement in the inheritance of traditional legal culture lies in how to translate its institutional experiences, value systems, and governance wisdom into knowledge resources that contemporary rule of law construction can comprehend, verify, and utilize. This requires reliable data, systematic organization of legal knowledge, and standardized dissemination. Concurrently, the generative mechanisms of AI may introduce risks, including historical distortion, algorithmic bias, cultural misinterpretation, ambiguous rights attribution, and threats to personal information and data security. Therefore, empowering the inheritance of China’s fine traditional legal culture through AI necessitates not only functional construction across scenarios such as inheritance, translation, education, and communication, but also the establishment of fundamental boundaries grounded in authenticity, legality, explainability, traceability, and human agency. Moving forward, institutional synergy should be forged in data governance, expert review, generated content labeling, intellectual property protection, public cultural platform development, and ethical regulation. Ultimately, this will facilitate the transition of AI from a mere technological tool to a standardized mechanism serving the inheritance of legal civilization and the advancement of digital rule of law.
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