Buddhism and Agency in the Age of AI

Who Wrote This?

I sometimes wonder if what I’ve written is truly mine. I ask AI to polish a sentence, and the result is better than my original. So I hand over a paragraph. Then a draft. At some point I stop being the author and become the editor — and eventually I have to ask: who wrote this?

The question sounds like a copyright dispute. It deserves a closer look. When the mouse moves on its own, when an algorithm opens files and sends emails, where exactly does “my” action end? Can agency be handed over piece by piece — and if so, what remains when the handover is complete?

Buddhism has engaged with these questions for 2,500 years. If there is no fixed self — if “I” is a temporary assembly of processes, as the doctrine of non-self (anattā) holds — then who acts? And when something goes wrong, who is responsible? The answer the tradition gives is not easy to accept — but neither is it evasive: no agent, yet the fruit remains.

The essay explores what happens when this ancient observation meets a very new problem. It reads the seven stations of consciousness (satta viññāṇaṭṭhitiyo) alongside cloud-based AI, the five aggregates (pañcakkhandhā) through information theory, and karma as a framework for accountability in an age of autonomous systems. A cloud AI is one model with millions of users — one perception, many bodies. Did an ancient taxonomy already leave room for that possibility?

The Korean original, 「AI 시대의 주체성 문제, 불교가 답하다」, appears in the summer issue of Buddhist Review. An English adaptation is forthcoming in Buddhadharma.