“I’ll do it”: AI Agents are Replacing Human Agency
- S B
- Jul 2, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 11, 2025
Not so long ago, the travel agent was far more central to how people planned their vacations. These professionals were responsible for organizing and booking trips on a person’s behalf. Want to go on a cruise? Reach out to your travel agent. Planning a trip to Paris? Same thing. They would buy tickets, shop around for hotels, and build a full itinerary tailored to your needs.
Then something happened: the internet. Suddenly, travel giants emerged, shrinking the profession into a niche market. Cruises, flights, and hotels could all be booked online with no human agents involved, thanks to sites like Priceline and Expedia. Little did the world know then that this was only the beginning. A human agent was replaced by an algorithm that allowed us to choose how to travel. And now, we ourselves are being replaced by an AI that decides if and how we will travel.
Delegated Will: How AI Agents Are Replacing Human Agency
In a sea of AI ethics and questions about what it means to be human in an AI-enabled world, nothing is more paradoxical than the rise of the AI agent. Human beings have long believed that our superior position on the planet was due to our agency: our ability to act, to choose, to exercise free will. Yet remarkably, the AI revolution has ushered in a new form of comfort: giving away that free will to AI systems designed to make decisions for us. Put simply, AI agents are replacing human agency, not in grand, sweeping gestures, but in the accumulation of everyday choices we no longer make ourselves.
Known as operators, these AI agents are designed to connect to our computer programs and digital devices, quietly working in the background as assistants, meal planners, personal shoppers, and more. They don’t ask; they do. They don’t deliberate; they optimize. And in doing so, they steadily erode one of the very traits that once defined what it meant to be human: the act of deciding for oneself.
Today, when the AI says, “I’ll do it,” it’s not just saving us time. It’s silently taking away the small, daily choices through which we shape our lives and identities. The agent has taken away everyday agency.
The Disappearing Voice
ChatGPT is helpful. That’s not up for debate. But even before the phrase “AI agent” entered mainstream discussions, GPT was already showing signs of agency.
Take, for example, its default behavior of rewriting a user’s inputs. When asked to proofread, GPT doesn’t just check for grammar. It rewrites the content, often altering the voice and uniqueness of the original message. No one seemed alarmed. Instead, it was seen as GPT simply polishing the text, improving it.
But what if the very definition of “improvement” is itself a kind of decision? A choice about tone, emphasis, or interpretation? What seems like assistance might actually be the first step in replacing our voice with a more average, more compliant, more agreeable one. In this way, even GPT’s early iterations were not just aiding communication. They were subtly redefining it.
GPT’s love of the em dash triggered AI policing of writing, but many overlooked the bigger picture: GPT was choosing how we expressed ourselves. Now, people simply remove the em dash, while GPT continues to shape their content and thus their voices behind the scenes. The agent has taken away literary agency.
Crayon Memories and Creative Surrender
We first learned to draw in kindergarten. Many of us picked up our crayons and created our first scenes: a tree, a sun, some clouds, flowers, and maybe a stick figure or two. And even though we all drew essentially the same things, each creation was unique. Some of us gripped the crayon tightly, others held it loosely, letting the colors appear in soft shades. Some clouds were large, some small. Some looked more like pancakes than clouds, but they were ours.
Now, we have AI tools that can draw for us. These are incredibly useful systems for content generation in both creative and professional settings. But much like GPT and writing, many have outsourced their preferences and vision in the name of simplicity.
Case in point: if we were to prompt an AI to generate one of those kindergarten scenes, how many of us would sit there and carefully guide the AI to recreate our pancake-looking clouds or the hues our crayons used to leave behind? Most people simply type: “tree, sun, cloud, stick figure” and leave the rest to the AI.
Nowhere is this handover more blatant than in text-to-video generation. It is a clear and visible transfer of creative agency. The user becomes a commissioner, not a creator. They are ordering a product rather than birthing a vision.
To be fair, I use these tools myself, and I see their utility. In fact, I prefer image generation to video because I spend time personalizing my images. So to be truthful, I do not entirely hand over my creative vision to AI. But the trend is clear: convenience often replaces intentionality, and automation often replaces ownership. The agent has taken away visual agency.
Conclusion: The Imagination We Surrender
I could belabor industry after industry, such as music, where AI can now write our songs. But I won’t. Because this is more about who we are becoming than a list of what we are losing.
In many global traditions, the question of free will is heavily debated. Do we truly have it? Are we in control of our actions and behaviors? For millennia, this question has sat at the heart of theological and philosophical inquiry. Entire systems of belief are built around whether a divine force determines our paths, or whether we shape them ourselves.
And that brings me to the ultimate question: What exactly are we giving away to AI?
Is it just Cancun vs. the Bahamas for a cruise? An em dash instead of a colon? Surreal clouds instead of realistic ones? Or is it something else entirely?
I would argue that with each low-effort prompt to an AI, we are giving away something far more valuable: our imagination. The very imagination that made these AI systems a reality in the first place.
But the question I will leave you with is simply this:
Why are we so eager to hand it over?
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"AI is the tool, but the vision is human." — Sophia B.
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I’m exploring how generative AI is reshaping storytelling, science, and art — especially for those of us outside traditional creative industries.
About the Author
Sophia Banton works at the intersection of AI strategy, communication, and human impact. With a background in bioinformatics, public health, and data science, she brings a grounded, cross-disciplinary perspective to the adoption of emerging technologies.
Beyond technical applications, she explores GenAI’s creative potential through storytelling and short-form video, using experimentation to understand how generative models are reshaping narrative, communication, and visual expression.
