Understanding Creators' Acceptance of Content Reuse

Abstract

Content creators' work has long been reused by various technology developers and researchers; recently joining the ranks of content reusers are emergent generative AI models. However, creators' perspectives and acceptances of these use cases were often overlooked in the process. We present our initial findings on how content creators perceive scenarios of content reuse as acceptable, negotiable, or unacceptable. We surveyed 478 content creators on Instagram and a non-trivial percentage of respondents found content reuse for search engine display, education, and academic research acceptable. Conversely, content reuse for commercial or non-profit generative AI models was a negotiable scenario for most respondents. Receiving compensation was likely to make almost all use cases more acceptable to content creators. Our work paves the way for future work into understanding how creators value their work, research ethics, and best practices for using user-generated content for responsible technological innovation.