The Influencer Next Door: How Misinformation Creators Use GenAI

TL;DR

This study reveals that non-expert users leverage generative AI for creative content remixing and production, significantly increasing misinformation spread and content creation, driven by social narratives and lowered entry barriers.

Contribution

It shifts the focus from expert-driven disinformation to everyday users' bricolage with GenAI, highlighting new misinformation harms and usage patterns.

Findings

GenAI is primarily used for content creation, not fact-checking.

A narrative of influencer success motivates users to produce more content.

GenAI lowers barriers, increasing both consumer and creator activity.

Abstract

Advances in generative AI (GenAI) have raised concerns about detecting and discerning AI-generated content from human-generated content. Most existing literature assumes a paradigm where 'expert' organized disinformation creators and flawed AI models deceive 'ordinary' users. Based on longitudinal ethnographic research with misinformation creators and consumers between 2022-2023, we instead find that GenAI supports bricolage work, where non-experts increasingly use GenAI to remix, repackage, and (re)produce content to meet their personal needs and desires. This research yielded four key findings: First, participants primarily used GenAI for creation, rather than truth-seeking. Second, a spreading 'influencer millionaire' narrative drove participants to become content creators, using GenAI as a productivity tool to generate a volume of (often misinformative) content. Third, GenAI lowered the barrier to entry for content creation across modalities, enticing consumers to become creators and significantly increasing existing creators' output. Finally, participants used Gen AI to learn and deploy marketing tactics to expand engagement and monetize their content. We argue for shifting analysis from the public as consumers of AI content to bricoleurs who use GenAI creatively, often without a detailed understanding of its underlying technology. We analyze how these understudied emergent uses of GenAI produce new or accelerated misinformation harms, and their implications for AI products, platforms and policies.