In the context of the digital era, the protection and inheritance of traditional cultural heritage face unprecedented opportunities and challenges. This study takes Jingchu folk patterns as the research object and constructs a community participatory generation platform based on Stable Diffusion, exploring new models of digital protection of cultural heritage through the organic combination of technological innovation and mechanism design. The study adopts a mixed-methods research paradigm, recruiting 486 participants from different backgrounds for platform testing and data collection through a six-month longitudinal empirical study. The empirical results show that the platform successfully generated 12,847 high-quality Jingchu folk pattern works, with the cultural diversity index increasing from 2.31 to 3.67, the average cultural knowledge level of participating users improving by 34.7%, and the 30-day retention rate of collaborative creation users reaching 67.8%. The study finds that cultural cognitive level, technology acceptance, and social connection strength are the key factors affecting users' deep participation, and moderate cultural distance (0.4-0.6) is most conducive to the generation and acceptance of innovative works. The research results can not only be directly applied to the protection and inheritance of Jingchu culture but also provide reference for the digital protection of other regional cultures and intangible cultural heritage, with important promotion value and application prospects.
Wu et al. (2026) studied this question.