Algorithmic Experience Governance: Reimagining Creativity and Co-creation in AI-driven Platforms

Generative artificial intelligence has become embedded infrastructure across creative platforms, yet scholarship continues to treat AI primarily as a creative tool or co-creative agent, without interrogating the structural conditions under which creative work unfolds. This article introduces the concept of algorithmic experience governance (AEG): the upstream structuring of creative participation, visibility, sequencing, evaluation and meaning-making through AI-driven platform systems. Drawing on platform ecosystem theory, institutional theory and socio-technical systems theory, the article develops an integrated framework that identifies five governance mechanisms, that is, algorithmic curation, sequencing and path dependency, personalisation as steering, generative mediation and evaluative framing, and maps them across individual, community, platform and ecosystem levels. The framework is grounded in the communicative dynamics of contemporary platforms, including TikTok’s narrative formats, influencer storytelling practices, AI-mediated branding, meme circulation and the cultural semiotics of AI-generated content. Three governance paradoxes and three recursive feedback loops capture the tensions and dynamics inherent in algorithmic governance of creative experience. Four formal propositions reframe creativity under AEG as structurally situated rather than diminished, and a research agenda of 20 questions offers a programme for empirical investigation. The article argues that creativity in AI-driven platforms is not merely collaborative but governed collaboratively and that understanding this distinction is central to reimagining theory and practice.