Human Agency in the Age of AI: Towards Human-AI Co-Creation with High Control and High Automation

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Human Agency in the Age of AI: Towards Human-AI Co-Creation with High
Control and High Automation"

by

Mr. Leixian SHEN


Abstract:

Before the advent of Generative AI (GenAI), digital content creation mainly 
relied on manual authoring tools (e.g., Adobe Illustrator), where humans 
acted as operators with high precision but limited efficiency. Today, models 
like Gemini and Sora have fundamentally transformed this landscape, making it 
effortless to generate high-quality multimodal content. However, this rapid 
advancement introduces a fundamental tension: as AI becomes more powerful and 
autonomous, human agency— the meaningful ownership and control over the 
creative process—tends to diminish. Users risk being downgraded from creative 
authors to passive spectators.

To address this challenge, this thesis investigates the central research 
question: How can we scale AI automation without sacrificing human agency? We 
argue that achieving high automation and high control is not a zero-sum 
trade-off, but a design choice. This thesis presents a research journey that 
systematically expands the boundaries of human-AI co-creation across the 
content lifecycle, transitioning from concrete system explorations to 
abstract theoretical modeling.

The research unfolds across four progressive works. First, we explore the 
automation stage through Data Player, a system that automatically generates 
data videos with narration-animation interplay. While highly efficient, users 
become mere consumers, it exposes the necessity of fine-grained user input. 
Second, to address this, we expand agency to the alignment stage with Data 
Playwright. By introducing the "annotated narration" paradigm, we seamlessly 
synchronize natural language intents with generative capabilities, shifting 
the user's role from a passive consumer to an active director. Third, pushing 
beyond static outputs, we expand agency to the adaptation stage via Live 
Artifacts, a novel medium that encapsulates generative specifications within 
visual layers to continuously adapt to user contexts, elevating the human to 
an architect of living media. Finally, to provide a generalized foundation 
for these systems, we step back to perform a theoretical abstraction. We 
present the Interaction-Augmented Instruction (IAI) model, which formalizes 
the fundamental synergy between natural language prompts and GUI 
interactions.

Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates that in the age of AI, human agency is 
not what we save from machines; it is what we systematically evolve and 
expand alongside them.


Date:                   Monday, 28 April 2026

Time:                   3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:                  Room 2132C
                        Lift 22

Committee Members:      Prof. Huamin Qu (Supervisor)
                        Dr. Anyi Rao (Chairperson, AMC)
                        Dr. Arpit Narechania