MEDIATED AGENCY: A FRAMEWORK FOR CREATIVE SELF-EFFICACY IN HUMAN-AI COLLABORATION

Generative AI is reshaping creative practice by expanding what individuals can produce while complicating how effort, authorship, and mastery are understood. This article introduces mediated agency as a framework for explaining how human–AI collaboration reshapes creative self-efficacy and the horizons of creative possibility. Mediated agency refers to the experience of acting creatively when intention, process, and outcome are co-produced by human and algorithmic elements, producing new forms of attribution ambiguity, opacity, and uneven control. Extending Bandura’s account of self-efficacy, the framework reconceptualizes mastery experiences, vicarious learning, social persuasion, and affective states as relational processes unfolding within sociotechnical systems and examines how they are interpreted across three dimensions: control over process, authorship and attribution, and creative identity. The article differentiates mediated agency from co-creativity, human-centered AI, and technology adoption perspectives, and presents propositions and design principles for studying and supporting creative self-efficacy in AI-mediated contexts. Sustaining creative confidence requires attending not only to what AI enables people to produce but to how mediation shapes their experience of contribution, capability, and future creative possibility.