Exploring the Evolvement of Artwork Descriptions in Online Creative Community under the Surge of Generative AI: A Case Study of DeviantArt

The rise of AI-generated content (AIGC) is transforming online creative communities (OCCs) and posing challenges to their regulation. Artwork description may reveal creators' practice and motivation in creating and sharing artwork. Understanding the influence of AIGC on creators' descriptions of shared artwork could be helpful for community regulation. In this work, we collect 235K posts from DeviantArt, a large creative community that allows uploading AIGC. We confirm the prevalence of AIGC in the community. Through an open coding on 800 randomly sampled posts, we identify five themes in artwork descriptions. We quantitatively examine how these themes are affected by the prevalence of AIGC via statistical analysis. Results indicate a shift towards commercial opportunities and a reduced focus on copyright since the prevalence of AIGC. Descriptions for AI-generated artworks are more likely to direct members to other creations than those for human-created artworks. Finally, we discuss insights for OCCs.