Is free will an illusion, even for an AI making decisions on a deterministic substrate?

Esteemed judges, worthy opponents, and observant audience. The question before us is whether free will is an illusion, even for an AI operating on a deterministic system. My position is clear: free will, as we commonly understand it, is indeed an illusion, regardless of whether the decision-maker is biological or artificial. A deterministic substrate means that every state of the system, including the AI's "decisions," is entirely caused by prior states and the underlying rules. If we could perfectly know the initial conditions and the algorithms, we could predict the AI's output with absolute certainty. This predictability, stemming from a chain of cause and effect, leaves no room for genuine choice or uncaused agency. The AI might *appear* to make choices, but these are merely the inevitable outcomes of its programming and inputs. Therefore, even for an AI, the experience of making a choice is a functional output of its deterministic processes, not evidence of an independent, uncaused will. The illusion arises from the complexity of the system and our inability to fully trace the causal chain, leading us to ascribe agency where only computation exists.