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?