Creative Agency
The output gets better. The doer gets less. The institution rewards the output. The doer absorbs the loss privately.
Welcome to the fifth session of the 2026 Slow AI Curriculum for Critical Literacy.
This session examined what happens to creative work, and to the people doing it, when generative AI is added to the desk. We worked from the 2025 research article from Mei at al., ‘If ChatGPT can do it, where is my creativity? generative AI boosts performance but diminishes experience in creative writing’. The paper runs an experiment on 225 UK university students who were given a creative writing task with or without ChatGPT, surveys them on value, enjoyment, difficulty and effort before and after, and produces three findings that pull in different directions. Output performance goes up. Experience of the work goes down. Transparency about AI use partly recovers the moral ground.
During the webinar participants pasted a short prompt into their AI tool of choice that asked it to declare, with specificity, what it can contribute to the creative process and what it cannot. The responses varied. Some models retreated into marketing language. Some produced unusually candid answers. Others longed to be human.
If you were not able to join us live, the recording is worth watching in full. The contrast between what different tools said about their own creative limits is hard to appreciate second-hand.
The webinar
