In the last two years, Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has received significant attention, leading to an anecdotal rise in the amount of AIGC being shared via social media platforms. The impact of AIGC and its implications are of key importance to social platforms, e.g., regarding the implementation of policies, community formation, and algorithmic design. Yet, to date, we know little about how the arrival of AIGC has impacted the social media ecosystem. To fill this gap, we present a comprehensive study of Pixiv, an online community for artists who wish to share and receive feedback on their illustrations. Pixiv hosts over 100 million artistic submissions and receives more than 1 billion page views per month (as of 2023). Importantly, it allows both human and AI generated content to be uploaded. Exploiting this, we perform the first analysis of the impact that AIGC has had on the social media ecosystem, through the lens of Pixiv. Based on a dataset of 15.2 million posts (including 2.4 million AI-generated images), we measure the impact of AIGC on the Pixiv community, as well as the differences between AIGC and human-generated content in terms of content creation and consumption patterns. Our results offer key insight to how AIGC is changing the dynamics of social media platforms like Pixiv.

翻译：在过去两年中，人工智能生成内容（AIGC）受到了广泛关注，导致通过社交媒体平台分享的AIGC数量显著增长。AIGC的影响及其潜在意义对社交平台至关重要，例如在政策制定、社区形成和算法设计等方面。然而，迄今为止，我们对于AIGC的出现如何影响社交媒体生态系统知之甚少。为填补这一空白，我们对Pixiv——一个供艺术家分享插画并获取反馈的在线社区——进行了全面研究。截至2023年，Pixiv拥有超过1亿件艺术作品投稿，月页面访问量超过10亿次。重要的是，该平台允许上传人类生成内容与AI生成内容。利用这一特性，我们首次通过Pixiv的视角分析了AIGC对社交媒体生态系统的影响。基于一个包含1520万篇帖子（其中包括240万张AI生成图像）的数据集，我们衡量了AIGC对Pixiv社区的影响，并比较了AIGC与人类生成内容在内容创作和消费模式上的差异。研究结果为理解AIGC如何改变Pixiv等社交媒体平台的动态提供了关键洞见。