Threatened by AI: Analyzing Users’ Responses to the Introduction of AI in a Crowd-sourcing Platform

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions are being rapidly deployed, they increasingly compete with human labor. This study examines users’ responses to the introduction of an AI system for logo design in a decentralized crowdsourcing marketplace for design tasks. We focus on contestants (i.e., designers) who were active both before and after the introduction of the AI system. We find that designers who had primarily participated in contests for lower-tier, less-complex, logo-design contests continue to participate in these contests, while designers who had some prior exposure to more-complex logo-design contests and non-logo contests, increasingly switch to those contests after the AI launch. Using propensity score matching (PSM) with difference-in-differences methods (DiD) we find that the successful designers become more focused (i.e., they increase the number of re-submissions per contest) and more quality-oriented (i.e., they increase emotional content and complexity of their design submissions), after the AI launch. In contrast, the unsuccessful designers increase participation across multiple contests, but do not change the quality (emotional content and complexity) of their design submissions after the AI launch. These findings have important implications for research on the impacts of AI on participants’ behaviors and for the design of such crowdsourcing platforms.