According to the IMF, South Korea has one of the highest AI adoption rates in the world. About a third of the population uses ChatGPT every month. The newly elected government led by Lee Jae Myung is putting AI at the forefront of its economic policy. In Korea’s highly pluralistic society, religious communities are already experimenting with AI in strikingly diverse ways. This panel invites papers focusing on any topic related to the present and future relationship between Korean religions and AI, including: approaches to the use of AI related to Korean religious values, applications of AI in religious communities or scholarship, and/or ethical and philosophical debates about AI. Why should scholars interested in religion and AI pay attention to Korea?
As scholars have begun examining how AI is reshaping religion, one question often goes unnoticed: How have religious practices and institutions legitimated AI infrastructure? This paper examines how Naver, South Korea's dominant platform company, appropriated a 750-year-old Buddhist heritage to legitimate its AI infrastructure, revealing religion and AI as co-constituted in ways invisible in Western-centric discourse. This paper analyzes how Naver named its data center "Gak" after Janggyeong-gak at Haeinsa Temple, the 15th-century depositories housing the Tripitaka Koreana, constructing an imaginary that recast economic protectionism as cultural patriotism and AI sovereignty. The paper traces how this imaginary became self-contradictory through global expansion and raises questions about the Jogye Order's strategic silence. It concludes that religious communities risk losing interpretive power over their own traditions when those traditions are instrumentalized as legitimating infrastructure for corporate AI ambitions.
This essay focuses on two key Korean values and applies them into the context of virtuous AI and pro-social robots. Jeong (정, 情), a traditional Korean emotion, represents a deep sense of solidarity, bond, self-motivated sacrifice, and self-sacrificial love for others based on empathy for both humans and nonhuman things. Hongik ingan (홍익인간, 弘益人間) means ‘to benefit the world widely.’ Drawn from the founding myth of the ancient Korea (Gojoseon), it provokes emotional and spiritual empathy for people and things. When properly implemented, the principle of jeong and hongik ingan have the potential to mitigate the risks posed by AI and foster more harmonious relationships between humans and robots. When the interaction between humans and AI robots becomes more important, the Korean concept of jeong may offer an ideal model of good and meaningful collaboration. Hongik ingan contains the vision of creating a beneficial world with non-human beings.
Most existing discussions of AI within data capitalism focus on technological and economic dimensions. This paper instead proposes to understand AI as a political actor operating within the infrastructures of data capitalism. In particular, it explores how algorithmic governance reshapes social memory. This paper engages the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz, especially his concept of dangerous memory. Metz argues that Christian faith preserves the memory of historical suffering and the victims of history as a critical force that challenges dominant political and economic systems. Metz’s theology provides a powerful framework for critiquing data capitalism, which often reduces human experience to decontextualized data while marginalizing historical suffering and structural injustice. By bringing Metz’s concept of memory into dialogue with AI-driven data capitalism, this study develops a political-theological critique of algorithmic systems and reflects on the ethical responsibility of preserving the memory of injustice in the age of artificial intelligence.