For Creators, Higher Incomes Mean More Pressure To Use Ai

• High-earning creators and music artists face intense pressure to adopt AI tools, a new survey found.
• That pressure rose steadily with income level.
• Creators have to balance AI's efficiency benefits with the risk of backlash for using it.

Content creators and music artists are feeling pressure to use AI, and the higher up the income ladder you go, the more acute it is.

That's the key takeaway from a new survey, shared exclusively with Business Insider, which found six-figure creators and artists in the US were more than three times as likely (64%) to say they felt "large" or "very large" pressure to use AI, compared with the lowest earners (19%).

That pressure rose steadily with income level.

The findings come from Sapio Research, which surveyed 2,000 professional content creators and music artists in the US from March to April on behalf of Epidemic Sound, a music and sound platform based in Sweden.

Those earning $50,000 or more also embraced AI at higher rates. Forty-four percent of those earning $50,000 to $100,000 said they used fully AI-generated music or content in their work, as did 45% of those earning over $100,000. Only 23% of those making under $5,000 said the same.

Gracie Schram, global head of creator partnerships and strategy at Epidemic Sound, said higher-earning creators face bigger output and distribution expectations, adding that they tend to be early adopters in general and have access to more tools.

"They're distributing multiple videos every day, on YouTube, Snapchat, Spotify," she said. "It comes with this distribution predicament. They're getting invited to do more stuff on platforms, which leads to more pressure to make more stuff. With these big creators, it's a huge amount of pressure to stay relevant."

AI presents competing challenges for creators. The tech can be a time-saver and a creativity enhancer, but creators draw value from the trust their audiences place in them, and the US public remains uneasy about AI. Some creators have also feared reputational damage from platforms labeling their work as AI-generated if they use AI tools.

The risk varies by creator. Those who use AI to pump out a lot of content or use it in ways their followers see as inauthentic are especially at risk of backlash, said Victoria Bachan, CEO of talent management agency Hyphen.

"It comes down to, 'What is your social contract with the audience you serve?'" she said. "You aren't going to have AI make a recipe. We do have creators who have done AI deals, but it aligns with their content like tech, finance education."

Henrik Olsson, a Stockholm-based music artist who creates for Epidemic Sound, said that as an artist who makes a "comfortable living," he depends on AI for scripting and editing to help produce his social media content.

Schram said the creators she works with often use AI to speed up their workflow, including editing and testing A/B concepts. A creator could use AI to make storyboards that wouldn't be part of the final creative product, for example.

In the survey, 77% of all US creators said human-made content was becoming a premium offering for audiences in the era of AI, and 78% said clear AI disclosure was essential to maintaining trust.

"They still want human creativity to be at the center," Schram said.

Olsson predicted the rise of AI would push artists to be more creative, rather than replace their art.

"We have to be one step ahead," he said.