Where Does the Human End? Creative Agency with Generative AI across Five Years of Chinese Digital Painting

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.