  The arrival of Large Language Models (LLMs) has stirred up philosophical
debates about the possibility of realizing agency in an artificial manner. In
this work we contribute to the debate by presenting a theoretical model that
can be used as a threshold conception for artificial agents. The model defines
agents as systems whose actions and goals are always influenced by a dynamic
framework of factors that consists of the agent's accessible history, its
adaptive repertoire and its external environment. This framework, in turn, is
influenced by the actions that the agent takes and the goals that it forms. We
show with the help of the model that state-of-the-art LLMs are not agents yet,
but that there are elements to them that suggest a way forward. The paper
argues that a combination of the agent architecture presented in Park et al.
(2023) together with the use of modules like the Coscientist in Boiko et al.
(2023) could potentially be a way to realize agency in an artificial manner. We
end the paper by reflecting on the obstacles one might face in building such an
artificial agent and by presenting possible directions for future research.
