Shaping AI’s Beliefs Before It Generates: Human Sense of Agency in Creative AI

AI systems for creative media generation expand human capabilities yet risk diminishing human agency. A core problem is \emph{creative anchoring}: when an AI immediately generates a polished artifact from a prompt, the user's thinking becomes anchored to the generated content, shifting the role of the human creator from active authoring to reactive editing. We propose \emph{pre-generation belief control}, empowering creators to inspect, revise, and steer the AI's interpretation \emph{before} any media is generated, so that the creative anchor is set by the human. We formalize four design principles and instantiate them in the Proactive Co-Creator (PaCC), a system that proactively surfaces its assumptions and uncertainty through clarifications, belief graphs, and media attributes, inviting users to shape the AI's beliefs before generation. In an exploratory study ($N{=}8$), PaCC yielded large positive effect sizes for SoA ($d{=}1.30$) and control ($d{=}1.29$), whereas changes in ownership and authorship were modest. These findings suggest that process control and creative authorship may be partially decoupled in human-AI co-creation.