CONCEPT
Gongsheng
The Chinese philosophical concept of co-becoming—entities that are mutually embedded, co-constituting, and co-existing in ways that change both parties—and Bing Song's central framework for thinking about the human-AI relationship as ontologically formative rather than merely instrumental.
The word gongsheng (共生) is used in Chinese to translate the biological term symbiosis, but it carries philosophical and political weight the biological term does not. It refers not merely to organisms that live together but to entities that
become together—that are constituted through their ongoing relationship and cannot be understood apart from it.
Bing Song has made gongsheng the central concept of her work on AI, and the choice is philosophically precise: gongsheng names the dimension of human-AI interaction that the dominant frameworks—both technical alignment work and liberal political philosophy—systematically fail to capture. When millions of people enter into sustained relationships with AI systems—using them as advisors, creative collaborators, companions, teachers—those relationships shape the people who inhabit them. They cultivate certain capacities and atrophy others. They produce certain relational habits and foreclose others. The
[YOU] on AI cycle documents this constitutive dimension with unusual honesty; gongsheng provides the philosophical vocabulary for naming it precisely. The question of AI