The Role of AI in Facilitating User-Generated Content

Abstract

This essay examines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies might spur the development of User-Generated Content (UGC). Attention to AI in the context of promoting, analyzing, or facilitating UGC is recent. There is a growing awareness and critical discussion of the transformative effect AI technologies have on how content is created, consumed, and interacted with. Thus, both basic and novel insights into relevant areas are provided. AI technologies and their effect on UGC practices location in the broader UGC and AI landscape are discussed. Attention is given to the potential of emerging AI tools to enhance user engagements with UGC, as well as the potential of AI to increase diversity in user participation and the adopted practices. Lastly, it is noted that adopting gaining and analyzing practices can give rise to concerns regarding user control, transparency, and individual and societal welfare, and how these concerns should be acted upon are curated. User-Generated Content (UGC) is resorted to here as various forms of media content made publicly available by individuals who are not professional content creators. The engagement of Web 2.0 technologies in the mid-2000s then sparked a steady rise of UGC, with platforms allowing and fostering the exchange, remixing, and co-production of UGC items. The characteristic bottom-up nature of UGC is responsible for the decline of symmetrical broadcasting and the rise of phenomena such as viral videos, memes, vlogs, and fan fiction as was investigated in this time frame. AI technologies able to analyze and generate human-like language data have been in development since the 1960s. However, only in the current decade have they experienced a rapid advancement and transformative deployment. Automatic content creation, personalization, or curation are now widely available, and AI “content influencers” are fostering new UGC formats, practices, and ecologies.

Keywords AI, user-generated content, content creation, user engagement, diversity, transparency, Web 2.0, content curation