Livestream communities for AI-generated video content: Viewers’ motivations and perceptions of toxicity and moderation

Abstract

AI is transforming live streaming with new communities forming around channels featuring automated or prompt-based AI-generated videos. By introducing AI as an active and sometimes unpredictable participant in community interactions, traditional creator-audience and audience-audience relations are disrupted, presenting challenges for toxicity and moderation. This paper presents findings from a mixed-methods survey of viewers (n=60[jls-end-space/]) to understand their motivations for engaging with AI content, perceptions of toxicity, and moderation preferences. Our findings highlight the variety of viewer motivations of the participants of the surveyed communities with both individual and social aspects, that viewers were more engaged by AI interactions and user-generated prompts than by other viewers, and that toxicity arose from various sources and negatively related to the sense of community, with most viewers favouring in-community moderation. Our insights represent an initial descriptive examination of communities that rely exclusively on fast-paced AI-generated content and underscore the need for updated moderation strategies to sustain healthier dynamics in AI livestreams.