How Do Human Creators Embrace Human-AI Co-Creation? A Perspective on Human Agency of Screenwriters

2026-02-06

AI Summary

This study addresses the limited understanding of how human creators dynamically construct practices, regulate behaviors, and reflect on their development when collaborating with generative AI. Grounded in Bandura’s theory of human agency, it employs a two-week field study combining in-depth observation and semi-structured interviews with 19 professional screenwriters engaged in human-AI co-creation. The research uncovers the agentic mechanisms through which screenwriters actively shape collaborative cognitive models, strategies, and workflows, and delineates a developmental trajectory of their capabilities. Building on these insights, the study proposes a novel design paradigm for AI tools that supports human agency, offering actionable recommendations for optimizing collaboration among creators, developers, and researchers.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems

Abstract

Generative AI has greatly transformed creative work in various domains, such as screenwriting. To understand this transformation, prior research often focused on capturing a snapshot of human-AI co-creation practice at a specific moment, with less attention to how humans mobilize, regulate, and reflect to form the practice gradually. Motivated by Bandura's theory of human agency, we conducted a two-week study with 19 professional screenwriters to investigate how they embraced AI in their creation process. Our findings revealed that screenwriters not only mindfully planned, foresaw, and responded to AI usage, but, more importantly, through reflections on practice, they developed themselves and human-AI co-creation paradigms, such as cognition, strategies, and workflows. They also expressed various expectations for how future AI should better support their agency. Based on our findings, we conclude this paper with extensive discussion and actionable suggestions to screenwriters, tool developers, and researchers for sustainable human-AI co-creation.

Problem

• human-AI co-creation
• human agency
• screenwriting
• generative AI
• creative practice

Innovation

• human agency
• human-AI co-creation
• generative AI
• screenwriting
• reflective practice