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

Part of the Lubar Research Seminar Series

Speaker: Gene Moo Lee, UBC Sauder School of Business

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.