Tag Archives: generative AI

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.

 

Generative AI and Creator Economy: Investigating the Effects of AI-Generated Voice on Online Video Creation

Zhang, Xiaoke, Mi Zhou, Gene Moo Lee “Generative AI and Creator Economy: Investigating the Effects of AI-Generated Voice on Online Video Creation”, R&R at Management Science.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize the creative industry by reshaping the human creative process. We explore the potential of generative AI in the creator economy by investigating the effects of AI-generated voice adoption on creators’ productivity and creative patterns on TikTok, one of the world’s largest video-sharing platforms. Using a unique 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. This effect is larger among less experienced or less popular creators, suggesting an equalizing effect of generative AI. Moreover, we find that the use of AI voice enhances video novelty across image, audio, and text modalities, especially among experienced creators, suggesting its role in reducing routine workload and fostering creative exploration. Lastly, our study also uncovers a disinhibition effect, where creators 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 generative AI reshapes online video creation.