From threat to reconfiguration: How content creators reshape occupational identity in AI-driven creative practices

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is disrupting creative work and challenging occupational identities, yet limited research has examined how creators experience and respond to these changes. Drawing on Albert Ellis’s ABC model, this study investigates relationships among GenAI adoption, identity threat, job crafting, and identity consequences. Using a two-stage exploratory mixed-method design with digital content creators in China, we combined BERTopic analysis of 2994 open-ended responses with structural equation modelling of matched survey data from 1698 creators. The findings show that GenAI is widely perceived through coexisting beliefs about threat, opportunity, and the unknown, and that these beliefs give rise to differentiated job crafting behaviours, including approach crafting, avoidance crafting, and identity crafting. Notably, identity crafting plays an important role in fostering a responsible creative identity and self-actualization. This study advances theorizing on AI technological innovation and creative labour by showing how job crafting translates GenAI disruption into responsibility-oriented and meaning-centered identity reshaping. It also offers actionable insights for creators, platforms, and creative communities seeking to support collaborative, sustainable, and ethically grounded human–AI co-creation.