Chinese digital painters balance human and AI roles in creative work
Where Does the Human End? Creative Agency with Generative AI across Five Years of Chinese Digital Painting
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
As AI tools become more capable, Chinese digital painters have mixed feelings about how much work to let AI handle versus what to keep for themselves. The artists found some early resistance to using AI to protect their unique style and ownership. Over five years, many came to share some tasks like backgrounds and sketches with AI, while others struggled to find their human role. The study highlights how artists decide and adjust where human creativity ends and AI assistance begins.
What this means in practice
- •For digital artists: Design flexible AI tools that let artists control which parts of their workflow are human-only or AI-assisted to protect creativity and authorship claims.
- •For creative software developers: Create AI interfaces with adjustable boundaries and provenance tracking to support shifting human-AI roles in art production over time.$Commercial implications: Enables software products that offer artists customizable AI collaboration features and proofs of creative ownership.
Authors
Yibo Meng, Ruiqi Chen, Shuheng Cao, Weijia Zhang, Chengxi Zang
Abstract
As generative AI enters creative work, practitioners must decide where AI assistance ends and human authorship begins. Human-agent interaction (HAI) research has examined AI as a tool, collaborator, consultant, and competitor. The longitudinal problem is how these roles are revised as systems become more capable, public, and economically embedded. We report a five-year interview study with 17 Chinese digital painters, based on annual semi-structured interviews from 2021 to 2025. Participants described recurring but non-uniform patterns of protective resistance, pragmatic task delegation, and, for some, reflective agency repartitioning. Early resistance protected observation, originality, signature, and ownership from AI. Later delegation placed AI in bounded tasks such as references, backgrounds, rough sketches, and client-facing drafts. By 2025, some participants built hybrid workflows around human-only zones, while others described fatigue, precarity, or difficulty locating a remaining human role. Peer norms, emotional climates, and production pressures shaped which delegations felt useful, acceptable, or exhausting. Copyright, authorship, and creative labor remained recurring limits on what participants were willing to delegate. We frame these accounts as longitudinal agency partitioning, the situated work of deciding which stages, responsibilities, values, and claims remain human in creative human-agent interaction. We discuss design implications for revisable agency-boundary controls, provenance scaffolds, and community-facing authorship norms.