Time: 13:30-15:00, Friday, September 11, 2026

Venue: Guoshun Campus, Room 303, Starr Building

Speaker: Lecturer Limei Chen, School of Economics and Management, South China Normal University

Moderator: Professor Lingfang Li

Topic: Generative AI as a Competitor: Content Creation and Platform Strategy

Abstract: With advances in generative AI, content platforms increasingly use creators’ output as training data to supply their own AI-generated content, which can compete with those same creators for consumer attention. This paper therefore studies how a content platform manages human-content production under this tension by adjusting its revenue-sharing rule and choosing its AI strategy. We develop a game-theoretic model in which creators allocate investment across content dimensions in response to revenue sharing and AI competition. We obtain three main findings. First, the revenue-sharing rule shapes both creators’ investment incentives and the competitive role of AI content, making the optimal rule regime-dependent. At an intermediate capability level, the platform discretely lowers sharing to use AI as a binding entry threat, then switches to a qualitatively different policy once direct AI competition becomes profitable. Second, platform-supplied AI distorts creators’ investment mix toward less productive content attributes that AI cannot learn to reproduce, but it need not reduce human-content quality. Under optimal sharing, quality is discontinuous and nonmonotonic in AI capability and may be lowest at intermediate levels rather than when AI is strongest. Finally, although supplying AI content is always profitable for the platform, it may restrain AI capability to protect the human-content base it continues to monetize, even in the absence of AI development costs. At the platform’s optimal capability, however, AI still diverts consumer attention from human content and leaves creators worse off than without AI, showing that protecting content quality does not amount to protecting creators.

Bio: Limei Chen is a Young Talent Scholar at the School of Economics and Management, South China Normal University. She received her PhD in Economics from Fudan University. Her research interests include industrial organization theory, contract theory, and the digital economy, with a particular focus on platform incentives, platform self-preferencing, and the use of platform data. Her research has been published in leading international journals, and she received funding under the 2026 Young Scientists Fund (Category C) of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.