Toward a Symbiotic Society with Generative AI: For Living Together into the Future

The rise of large language models has made AI alignment an urgent concern—but aligning AI to human values presupposes that those values are fixed, when in fact they are emergent, culturally contingent, and historically evolving. From the perspective of symbol emergence systems theory, language and the ethics expressed through it are not static targets but dynamic equilibria continuously reshaped by collective activity. This chapter examines how generative AI is already altering our linguistic habits and, by extension, our thinking, and argues for a framework of mutual, dynamic co-adaptation rather than one-directional alignment. It also confronts the crisis of "human-likeness" triggered by AI's mastery of higher-order cognitive tasks, proposing that human distinctiveness lies not in any single ability but in the micro–macro loop of symbol emergence—our capacity to both inherit and creatively reshape the symbol systems that constitute our shared world. Living authentically in the age of generative AI means engaging this loop: neither passively submitting to existing symbolic structures nor abandoning them, but continuously participating in their collective re-creation.