Diffusing Artificial Intelligence: To What End? Infrastructure, Power, and Human Agency Density

Conceptual note - Bilingual version: English followed by Portuguese. English abstract The diffusion of generative artificial intelligence should not be assessed solely in terms of expanded access, the pace of institutional adoption, or the productivity gains it promises. Drawing on Nick Srnicek's distinction between innovation and diffusion strategies in artificial intelligence, this note poses an additional question: which forms of human agency does a given diffusion policy preserve, distribute, weaken, or gradually render unnecessary? It mobilizes Human Agency Density (HAD), originally formulated in Portuguese as Densidade de Agência Humana (DAH), as a developing hypothesis for examining the quality of human presence in processes mediated by generative systems. By situating the problem in higher education and Brazilian public universities, the note connects human formation, technological dependence, and institutional capacity to deliberate over increasingly outsourced cognitive infrastructures.