Tag Archives: generative AI

From Enthusiasm to Reality: Evaluating Generative AI’s Role in Modern Journalism

Zhang, Xiaoke, Myunghwan Lee, Mi Zhou, Gene Moo Lee “From Enthusiasm to Reality: Evaluating Generative AI’s Role in Modern Journalism”, Work-in-progress.

  • Presentations: UBC (2024)

Generative AI (GenAI), initially greeted with enthusiasm for its potential for content creation, encounters challenges when applied in professional settings such as journalism. These challenges, including the generation of inaccurate outputs, inconsistencies, and a reduction in human accountability, may pose conflicts with the core journalistic values of accuracy, transparency, and credibility. Our research investigates the impact of GenAI in news media leveraging a unique empirical setting when a major news outlet in South Korea launched a GenAI-powered news editor to assist its journalists in news production in December 2023. Our preliminary analysis of 196,288 news articles published between June 2023 and April 2024 suggests that GenAI adoption has not led to a significant increase in productivity, indicating persistent challenges in effectively integrating GenAI into journalistic workflows. Our study seeks to further explore this phenomenon by addressing two primary questions. First, we will conduct a survival analysis to identify effective GenAI strategies that lead to consistent GenAI use and positive outcomes in news production. Second, we will examine the impact of GenAI on the overall media news output (e.g., local vs. global; factual vs. opinion news) and discuss its broader implications in ideology formation (e.g., polarization). This research will contribute to the nascent literature on GenAI’s impact on digital platforms by providing a nuanced understanding of the phenomenon.

Unpacking AI Transformation: The Impact of AI Strategies on Firm Performance with a Dual Lens on Product and Process Orientation

Park, Jaecheol, Myunghwan Lee, J. Frank Li, Gene Moo Lee “Unpacking AI Transformation: The Impact of AI Strategies on Firm Performance with a Dual Lens on Product and Process Orientation”, Work-in-Progress.

  • Presentations: UBC (2024), INFORMS (2024)

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies hold great potential for large-scale economic impact. Aligned with this trend, recent studies explore the adoption impact of AI technologies on firm performance. However, they predominantly measure AI capabilities with input (e.g., labor/job posting), neglecting to consider the strategic use of such AI input in business operations and value creation. In this paper, we empirically examine how firms’ strategic AI orientation affects firm performance with a dual-lens on product and process orientation. We create a novel firm-year-level AI orientation measure by employing a large language model to analyze business descriptions in Form 10-K filings and identify an increasing trend of AI disclosure among U.S. public firms. By further dissecting firms’ AI disclosure into AI mention and AI (product and process) orientation, our long-difference analyses show that AI orientation significantly affects costs, sales, and market value but AI mention does not, showing the importance of strategic deployment of AI to create business value. Moreover, we find the heterogeneous effects across AI product orientation and AI process orientation on performance. This study contributes to the recent AI management literature by providing the strategic role of AI orientation on firm performance.

Xiaoke Zhang’s Master’s Thesis

Xiaoke Zhang (2023). “How Does AI-Generated Voice Affect Online Video Creation? Evidence from TikTok”, Master’s Thesis, University of British Columbia

Supervisors: Gene Moo Lee, Mi Zhou

The rising demand for online video content has fostered one of the fastest-growing markets as evidenced by the popularity of platforms like TikTok. Because video content is often difficult to create, platforms have attempted to leverage recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) to help creators with their video creation process. However, surprisingly little is known about the effects of AI on content creators’ productivity and creative patterns in this emerging market. Our paper investigates the adoption impact of AI-generated voice – a generative AI technology creating acoustic artifacts – on video creators by empirically analyzing a unique dataset of 4,021 creators and their 428,918 videos on TikTok. Utilizing multiple audio and video analytics algorithms, we detect the adoption of AI voice from the massive video data and generate rich measurements for each video to quantify its characteristics. We then estimate the effects of AI voice using a difference-in-differences model coupled with look-ahead propensity score matching. Our results suggest that the adoption of AI voice increases creators’ video production and that it induces creators to produce shorter videos with more negative words. Interestingly, creators produce more novel videos with less self-disclosure when using AI voice. We also find that AI-voice videos received less viewer engagement unintendedly. Our paper provides the first empirical evidence of how generative AI reshapes video content creation on online platforms, which provides important implications for creators, platforms, and policymakers in the digital economy.

 

How Does AI-Generated Voice Affect Online Video Creation? Evidence from TikTok

Zhang, Xiaoke, Mi Zhou, Gene Moo Lee “How Does AI-Generated Voice Affect Online Video Creation? Evidence from TikTok”, Working Paper.

The rising demand for online video content has fostered one of the fastest-growing markets as evidenced by the growing popularity of platforms like TikTok. In response to the challenges of video creation, these platforms are increasingly incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) to support creators in their video creation process. However, little is known about how AI integration influences online content creation. Our paper aims to address this gap by investigating the impact of AI-generated voice on video creators’ productivity and creative patterns. Using a comprehensive dataset of 554,252 videos from 4,691 TikTok creators, we conduct multimodal analyses of the video data to detect the adoption of AI voice and to quantify video characteristics. We then estimate the adoption effects using a stacked difference-in-differences model coupled with propensity score matching. Our results suggest that AI voice adoption significantly increases creator productivity. Moreover, we find that the use of AI voice enhances video novelty across image, audio, and text modalities, suggesting its role in reducing workload on routine tasks and fostering creative exploration. Lastly, our study also uncovers a disinhibition effect, where creators tend to conceal their identities with the AI voice and exert more negative sentiments because of diminished social image concerns. Our paper provides the first empirical evidence of how AI reshapes online video creation, providing important implications for creators, platforms, and policymakers in the creator economy.

Learning Faces to Predict Matching Probability in an Online Dating Market (ICIS 2022)

Kwon, Soonjae, Gene Moo Lee, Dongwon Lee, Sung-Hyuk Park (2024) “Digital Cupid: Empowering Generative AI for Fair and Efficient Matchmaking,” Working Paper.

  • Previous title: Learning Faces to Predict Matching Probability in an Online Dating Market
  • Presentations: DS (2021), AIMLBA (2021), WITS (2021), ICIS (2022)
  • Preliminary version in ICIS 2022 Proceedings
  • Based on an industry collaboration

With the increasing prevalence of online transactions, enhancing matching efficiency has emerged as a critical objective for most matching platforms. However, these efforts often lead to decreased fairness, making it challenging to balance these two elements. This study presents a novel generative AI-based approach to increase the platform’s efficiency and fairness simultaneously in the context of online dating. By developing a model that utilizes users’ multimodal features to predict individual preferences, we assess the impact of various matching algorithms on platform efficiency and fairness. Extensive simulations show that our fairness-aware algorithm significantly enhances both metrics, addressing conventional methods’ severe efficiency-fairness tradeoff issue. We also introduce a novel generative AI-based personalization technique that modifies users’ profile images in different directions according to their counterparts, further boosting efficiency without sacrificing fairness. Our matching framework can be applied to platforms with various objectives, contributing to all stakeholders in digital platforms.