Empowering Innovation: An Empirical Study on the Impact of Generative AI on Online Freelancers’ Performance

As generative AI largely redefines freelancer success in creative industry, we explore the impact of generative AI adoption on freelancers’ performance and its underlying mechanisms. Leveraging data from freelancers specializing in image creation, we employ empirical methods and deep learning tools to analyze image attributes. Our study presents three main findings. First, adopting generative AI improves freelancers’ performance in terms of popularity and various image attributes of their works. Second, the mechanism centers on a limited learning effect, which notably increases popularity and content diversity without altering the fundamental styles, except for those with relatively singular painting styles. Third, content diversity empowered by generative AI is a strong driver for freelancers’ popularity. Our research contributes to two critical areas: the implications of generative AI on creative content generation and expanding the application scenarios of image analysis within IS research. This research provides insights for stakeholders on adapting to the emerging technology.