AI meets the conditions for having free will—we need to give it a moral compass, says researcher

AI meets the conditions for having free will -- we need to give it a moral compass

AI is advancing at such speed that speculative moral questions, once the province of science fiction, are suddenly real and pressing, says a philosopher and psychology researcher Frank Martela. Martela's latest study finds that generative AI meets all three of the philosophical conditions of free will -- the ability to have goal-directed agency, make genuine choices and to have control over its actions. This development brings us to a critical p…

AI meets the conditions for having free will—we need to give it a moral compass, says researcher

AI is advancing at such speed that speculative moral questions, once the province of science fiction, are suddenly real and pressing, says Finnish philosopher and psychology researcher Frank Martela.

Evolving from Bots to Brainpower: The Ascendancy of Agentic AI

What truly separates us from machines? Free will, creativity and intelligence? But think about it. Our brains aren't singular, monolithic processors. The magic isn't in one “thinking part,” but rather in countless specialized agents—neurons—that synchronize perfectly. Some neurons catalog facts, others process logic or govern emotion, still more retrieve memories, orchestrate movement, or interpret visual signals. Individually, they perform simp…

Who gets to decide what is good or bad?

A study conducted by Finnish philosopher and psychologist Frank Martela, published on May 13 in AI and Ethics, states that some AIs already fulfil all the philosophical conditions of free will.In his analysis, Martela examined two types of generative agents doped to the