The Impact of ChatGPT’s Interactivity on Creative Workers’ Value Perceptions and Subscription Intentions

Given the high training costs of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, understanding the factors driving subscription intentions is crucial. This study examines how ChatGPT’s interactive features—perceived control, responsiveness, and personalization—affect creative workers’ perceptions of usefulness and enjoyment, ultimately shaping their subscription intentions. Grounded in utilitarian and hedonic value perspectives and leveraging ChatGPT’s transcombination capabilities—the ability to link diverse concepts and generate novel ideas—this research explores how ChatGPT addresses the unique functional and emotional needs of creative workers. Data from 148 creative workers reveal that perceived control and responsiveness significantly enhance both usefulness and enjoyment, highlighting the importance of dynamic, real-time interactivity for adaptability and immediate feedback. However, personalization has a weaker impact on usefulness and no measurable effect on enjoyment, likely due to limitations of inadequate conversational memory and difficulty processing nuanced inputs, which hinder its ability to address adaptive needs. Both usefulness and enjoyment strongly drive subscription intentions, emphasizing the need to balance functionality with emotional engagement. Practical recommendations focus on optimizing interactivity and transcombination to meet creative workers’ evolving demands.