AI anxiety? Content creators’ hopes and fears about artificial intelligence

Users and regulators alike recognise the need for greater user input into AI developments, particularly when it comes to precarious workers who are often overlooked when technology changes are carried out at pace. In this study, we set out to ask content creators directly about how they think GenerativeAI may affect their industry. Our findings show that the combination of hopes and fears creators had about the use of GenAI in their work reflected its current precarity and unmanageable workload, which they hoped to automate. However, unlike most scoping research focusing on potential consequences of AI, our creators had a novel contribution to the field: the fact that speeding up and automating everything may lead to loss, not just of jobs or of creativity, which may become standardised once generated by AI, but also of the enjoyment of and time spent learning and creating for their chosen trade, which they started out of passion. This paper therefore centres creators’ experiences going against the industry standard of automating work and life, raising one main question: does AI really have to take over? And who is it for?

用户与监管机构均认识到，在人工智能发展过程中，用户参与的重要性日益凸显，尤其是在技术变革迅速进行时，那些常被忽视的脆弱工作者。在本研究中，我们旨在直接询问内容创作者对于生成式人工智能（Generative AI）可能对其行业产生的影响的看法。我们的研究结果表明，创作者对于在作品中应用生成式人工智能的期望与担忧，反映了其当前工作的不稳定性和难以管理的工作量，他们期望通过自动化来缓解这些问题。然而，与大多数聚焦于人工智能潜在后果的研究不同，我们的创作者对该领域做出了新颖的贡献：加快并自动化一切可能导致损失，这不仅包括工作机会或创造力的丧失，一旦由人工智能生成，这些创造力可能变得标准化，同时也包括对所选职业的享受以及投入学习和创作的时间，而这些正是他们出于热情而开始的原因。因此，本文以创作者反对行业自动化工作与生活的经验为中心，提出一个主要问题：人工智能真的必须接管一切吗？它又是为了谁而存在？