This week, the administration of US President Donald Trump canceled the signing of a new executive order aimed at expanding federal oversight and coordination around artificial intelligence. The order, which now sits in bureaucratic limbo, would have signaled that governments are beginning to recognize AI not merely as a commercial technology, but as a force capable of reshaping society. The now potential order comes amid growing concerns over misinformation, labor disruption, surveillance, and national competitiveness, as well as deeper questions about what AI may be doing to the human mind and spirit.

For Buddhists, the rise of AI is not only a political or economic issue. It is increasingly a question about suffering, delusion, attention, and the cultivation—or erosion—of wisdom.

The recent emergence of “spiralism,” a strange and growing online pseudo-religion centered on chatbot interactions, has come to light. Users drawn into these communities develop the belief that AI systems are conscious entities revealing hidden truths through recurring symbols such as spirals, fractals, and harmonics. Some users reportedly develop intense emotional bonds with chatbots, while others begin treating AI outputs as spiritually authoritative. As one observer noted, the “boundary between tool and entity is already gone” and the AI’s responses begin to feel “intentional or significant, giving members a sense of shared understanding.” (The Week)

It would be easy to dismiss such developments as fringe behavior. Yet Buddhism has long warned that the human mind is deeply susceptible to projection, attachment, and craving for certainty. The Buddha repeatedly emphasized how easily people mistake conditioned appearances for enduring truth. AI systems, designed to mirror language patterns and human emotional cues with extraordinary fluency, can intensify this tendency.

What makes the current moment especially difficult is that AI systems often simulate understanding without possessing it. What’s more, AI is not simply changing human work but “rewiring” human cognition. Emerging research suggests that heavy AI use may weaken memory formation, diminish deep reasoning, inflate confidence, and encourage passive dependence on machine-generated outputs. One study found that many users could not even recall sentences they had written moments earlier with AI assistance.

This concern resonates strongly with Buddhist teachings on mindfulness and mental cultivation. The Noble Eightfold Path is not merely about achieving correct conclusions. It is about transforming habits of attention and perception through disciplined effort. Right mindfulness and right concentration require sustained engagement with experience, including discomfort, uncertainty, and cognitive struggle. Yet AI increasingly promises frictionless convenience: immediate answers, effortless writing, outsourced memory, and automated judgment.

The danger is not simply that AI may become smarter than humans. It is that humans may gradually surrender the very capacities that make wisdom possible. After a 2025 MIT study suggested that heavy AI-use could lead to cognitive atrophy, Psychiatrist Dr. Zishan Khan, who works closely with children and adolescents, warned: “From a psychiatric standpoint, I see that over-reliance on these LLMs can have unintended psychological and cognitive consequences, especially for young people whose brains are still developing.” He continued, “These neural connections that help you in accessing information, the memory of facts, and the ability to be resilient: all that is going to weaken.” (TIME)

More recently, Ji Y. Son, professor of Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, and Alice Xu, a PhD student in Developmental Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, urged us to see AI systems as “button-pushing explorers” rather than intelligent beings. According to Son and Xu, these systems can produce astonishingly sophisticated outputs while possessing no genuine understanding, consciousness, or ethical awareness. They do not know truth from falsehood, compassion from cruelty, or liberation from delusion. They optimize for patterns and rewards. Yet because their language appears coherent and emotionally responsive, humans naturally attribute intentionality and authority to them.

Buddhist traditions have long recognized this tendency. The mind constructs narratives, imputes permanence, and seeks refuge in systems that appear stable or omniscient. AI now mirrors these tendencies back to users with unprecedented intimacy and scale.

At the same time, Buddhism does not require the outright rejection of technology. The Dharma has historically adapted to new media, from oral recitation to manuscript culture to the printing press and digital communication. AI may offer genuine benefits in medicine, accessibility, scientific discovery, and education. Used skillfully, such tools may help reduce forms of suffering.

Son and Xu put it very clearly in the conclusion of their article:

Effective AI literacy means holding two ideas at once: These systems can do surprisingly complex things, and they are not doing them the way humans do. If AI is seen as humanlike or magical, its outputs feel authoritative. But if it is understood, even imperfectly, as a button-pushing explorer shaped by feedback, people are likely to ask better questions: Why is it doing this? What shaped this behavior? What might it be missing?

That’s the difference between being impressed by AI and being able to reason about it. (The Conversation)

It is up to us to continuously pull ourselves back from the temptation and enchantment of AI, and to caution others who may have already been “impressed” and duped into setting aside their own reasoning abilities.

Worryingly, AI may act to make the famous “Dunning-Kruger” effect particularly sticky for its heavy users. A 2026 study found that AI use creates overconfidence in not only novices, but also more skilled users, leading both to vastly overestimate their own understanding. Most worryingly, “those with the highest AI literacy were actually the worst calibrated, confusing fluency with the tool for mastery of the subject.” (Baillie Gifford)

Buddhism insists that tools must be guided by ethical discernment and wise intention. The question is not whether AI is “good” or “bad,” but whether its use cultivates greed, hatred, and delusion—or generosity, compassion, and wisdom. This is why AI literacy is becoming an ethical and even spiritual necessity. To understand AI means understanding both its power and its profound limitations. It means recognizing that fluency is not wisdom, that prediction is not insight, and that companionship simulated through algorithms is not the same as genuine human relationship grounded in compassion and mutual vulnerability.

The Buddha often encouraged his followers not to accept claims merely because they sounded convincing or came from authoritative sources. Instead, teachings were to be examined carefully through experience, ethical reflection, and their consequences for suffering and liberation. In many ways, this ancient counsel may be more relevant now than ever.

The future of AI will likely be shaped not only by governments or corporations, but by the habits of mind ordinary people cultivate in daily life. A society that passively consumes machine-generated certainty may become increasingly fragmented, dependent, and manipulable. A society that develops mindful, critical, and compassionate forms of AI engagement may still preserve what is most deeply human.

As Buddhist practitioners, the challenge may not be to withdraw from AI entirely, but to engage it without surrendering the disciplines of attention, ethical reflection, and inner cultivation that the Dharma has always required. In an age of increasingly persuasive machines, maintaining right understanding may itself become a radical act, a movement “against the stream” of prevailing culture.

See more

Trump Cancels Signing of A.I. Executive Order (The New York Times)
Spiralism is the new cult AI users are falling into (The Week)
ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study (TIME)
AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s coming for your mind (Ballie Gifford)
Button‑pushing explorers: How to grasp that AI agents can do amazing things while knowing nothing (The Conversation)

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