Call for paper: The double-edged sword of GenAI: Investigating the bright and dark sides of GenAI in digital business

The double-edged sword of GenAI: Investigating the bright and dark sides of GenAI in digital business

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) refers to a range of techniques and applications that use machine learning approaches, such as generative adversarial networks and transformer neural networks, to automatically generate text, images, video, code, and other forms of content that mimic human-generated content (Greengard, 2023). Since its introduction in 2022, GenAI has achieved tremendous success, causing drastic changes in many aspects of our lives. The adoption of GenAI is estimated to add at least a 15 to 40 percent increase to the existing economic value that non-generative artificial intelligence and analytics could unlock (Chui et al., 2023).

GenAI is efficient and cost-effective in producing massive amounts of content in a short time, which may reinvigorate traditional industries by creating innovative and appealing content to engage consumers at a deeper level (Zhang et al., 2023).

Following widespread and open adoption of GenAI in multiple contexts, numerous challenges have emerged, particularly in the field of digital business. GenAI sometimes lacks a nuanced understanding of the problem context, which may lead to inaccuracies and misinterpretations of consumers’ needs (Wu et al., 2023). Along with the newfound capability of GenAI, there are risks and concerns about data security and privacy due to insufficient governance initiatives to prevent misuse and recklessness (Bengio et al., 2024). Information validity and value have also been of concern, with issues of misinformation and deepfakes that consumers cannot discern (Campbell et al., 2022; Else, 2023), while algorithmic biases present in language processing and generating models such as Large Language Models (Bender et al., 2021). The lack of global consensus on the appropriate regulatory considerations, ethical standards and legal issues of GenAI could also exert a vast negative impact on both economies and societies (Dwivedi et al., 2021; 2023).

The focus of this special issue is to discuss the latest opportunities and challenges of GenAI for digital businesses and to collaborate on new ideas and solutions in this exciting field for scholars, entrepreneurs, and the public. We hope that this special issue will contribute to a better understanding of GenAI’s capacity to add value to and fuel the growth of digital businesses. We call for papers on behavioral research addressing interesting research questions at various levels of analysis, such as strategic, organizational, societal, economic, legal, and ethical perspectives. We welcome theoretical, empirical, and analytical contributions using research methods such as surveys, experiments, machine learning, text mining, simulations, case studies, and secondary data analysis.

List of Topic Areas

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

Artificial General Intelligence in digital business;
Generative AI business processes and management;
Generative AI business models;
Human-Generative AI co-creation;
Human-Generative AI collaboration and interaction;
Privacy and security issues of Generative AI in digital business;
Societal impacts of Generative AI in digital business;
Sustainability of Generative AI in digital business;
The dark side of Generative AI in digital business;
Other emerging issues of Generative AI in digital business.

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