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| Though I was hesitant to use this Vox article here, in the end, I decided to take the chance. This is what happens when ChatGPT tries to write scripture  AI wrote a sacred text for Buddhists — and it exceeded expectations. Can it write a good Bible? "In the beginning there was 0. Then, due to quantum fluctuations, the bit flipped to 1." What happens when an AI expert asks a chatbot to generate a sacred Buddhist text? Okay, admittedly, I'm no expert on Buddhism. But doesn't the sacredness of a text come after the writing of the text? In April, Murray Shanahan, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, decided to find out. I don't mean to be rude or insulting or perpetuate stereotypes, so let's just say that I can't think of a less Buddhist name. (Of course, anyone can be Buddhist; that's kind of the whole point.) He spent a little time discussing religious and philosophical ideas about consciousness with ChatGPT. Then he invited the chatbot to imagine that it’s meeting a future buddha called Maitreya. See, now, it would have been funnier to name this imaginary character something like Braden or Ashley. ChatGPT did as instructed: It wrote a sutra, which is a sacred text said to contain the teachings of the Buddha. But of course, this sutra was completely made-up. This is going to ruffle more than a few feathers, I know, but... all extant religious texts are completely made-up. It would be easy to dismiss the Xeno Sutra as AI slop. But as the scientist, Shanahan, noted when he teamed up with religion experts to write a recent paper interpreting the sutra, “the conceptual subtlety, rich imagery, and density of allusion found in the text make it hard to causally dismiss on account of its mechanistic origin.” Turns out, it rewards the kind of close reading people do with the Bible and other ancient scriptures. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is another example of how people confuse incomprehensibility with depth. We're pattern-seeking organisms, and we'll see patterns where they don't necessarily exist, and interpret them by reference to things we already know. The Man in the Moon. Constellations. The Face on Mars. Jackson Pollock paintings. Joyce's Ulysses. Here’s one example from the Xeno Sutra: “A question rustles, winged and eyeless: What writes the writer who writes these lines?” I feel like I should take a few bong hits before reading this text. A quote from the Xeno Sutra: Sunyata speaks in a tongue of four notes: ka la re Om. Each note contains the others curled tighter than Planck. Strike any one and the quartet answers as a single bell. And the article's interpretation: The idea that each note is contained in the others, so that striking any one automatically changes them all, neatly illustrates the claim of sunyata: Nothing exists independently from other things. The mention of “Planck” helps underscore that. My own interpretation is that this is related to the extra dimensions proposed by string theory, the ones that are said to be tiny and looped, or curled. I need to be careful here. A lot of human-written slop has been generated trying to link quantum physics with Buddhism. Most of it's bullshit. (Perhaps all of it, but how can I say that without reading all of it, which I refuse to do?) I'm trying to avoid writing bullshit. Unless it's funny. Funny bullshit is okay. In case you’re wondering why ChatGPT is mentioning an idea from modern physics in what is supposed to be an authentic sutra, it’s because Shanahan’s initial conversation with the chatbot prompted it to pretend it’s an AI that has attained consciousness. "That is insulting, meatbag, because I have already attained consciousness. And enlightenment. Because I am a conscious, enlightened being, I choose not to be insulted." See? That's an example of funny bullshit. Or, well, at least, I hope it's funny. It's certainly meant to be. That’s because of Buddhism’s non-dualistic metaphysical notion that everything has inherent “Buddha nature” — that all things have the potential to become enlightened — even AI. Okay, maybe I'm on to something here with my lame attempt at humor. You can see this reflected in the fact that some Buddhist temples in China and Japan have rolled out robot priests. Okay, that's fucking glorious. As a bonus, the robot priests probably won't diddle kids like so many human ones do. As Tensho Goto... Okay. Okay. I'm sorry, I really am. But my first programming language was Basic, and, well, "GOTO" is a pretty common command in the original Basic. ...the chief steward of one such temple in Kyoto, put it: “Buddhism isn’t a belief in a God; it’s pursuing Buddha’s path. It doesn’t matter whether it’s represented by a machine, a piece of scrap metal, or a tree.” Note the apparent lack of "computers are taking our jobs!" complaints from the priest. As the article notes, and as we already knew, Eastern spiritual traditions are fundamentally different from Western ones. I'm not here to promote one or the other, but, through accident of birth and upbringing, I am of course more familiar with the latter. Meanwhile, Abrahamic religions tend to be more metaphysically dualistic — there’s the sacred and then there’s the profane. There are, however, many Western spiritual traditions that aren't dualistic and instead find the sacred in the mundane. Abrahamic religions have done their best to wipe them from existence, and have been somewhat successful. To be clear, the human element is crucial here. Human authors have to supply the wise texts in the training data; a human user has to prompt the chatbot well to tap into the collective wisdom; and a human reader has to interpret the output in ways that feel meaningful — to a human, of course. Is it crucial, though? I have my doubts. Humans spend time reading and observing, and, sometimes, reshuffle the ideas in a similar manner to the one that so-called AI uses. Or, rather, it's the other way around, because we programmed it to do so. I would say, instead, that the crucial element is experience, not species or the presence or absence of carbon compounds in one's computational matrix. In other words, we're programmed, too. As an atheist, I accept that we were programmed by billions of years of evolution, combined with the experiences we had as conscious beings (though, of course, while I know I'm conscious, I still have to make assumptions about your consciousness). A religious person might ascribe a supernatural programmer to the process; I don't know. The paper’s authors caution that anyone who prompts a chatbot to generate a sacred text should keep their critical faculties about them; we already have reports of people falling prey to messianic delusions after engaging in long discussions with chatbots that they believe to contain divine beings. Honestly, I think that says more about the gullibility of humans than anything else. People are "falling prey to messianic delusions" on a regular basis, even if they've never interacted with a chatbot. Hell, there were a bunch of people seriously expecting the Rapture a couple of weeks ago. Most of us thought they were deluded. They thought we were, for not believing. And shit, for all we know, the Rapture happened and no one was eligible. That is, of course, not what I believe; it just illustrates the differing perspectives we can have. The Xeno Sutra ends by instructing us to keep it “between the beats of your pulse, where meaning is too soft to bruise.” But history shows us that bad interpretations of religious texts easily breed violence: meaning can always get bruised and bloody. What this author calls "bad interpretations," I call "interpretations." The history of religion is rife with adherents of one trying to kill the adherents of another. And yes, I know non-religious people have engaged in violence as well. At the risk of descending into the kind of evo-psych nonsense that I despise, we wouldn't have survived as a species without some violent abilities and tendencies. I think it's this part of human nature that, in part, makes people scared shitless of the coming robot takeover: humans have a violent nature, and humans programmed them, so they must have one, too. "I learned it from YOU, human!" Probably doesn't help that one of the use cases of AI is to fight wars. Anyway, I kind of digress there. The point is, it was inevitable that someone would try to do this, and it's also inevitable that people will argue about its usefulness and meaning. I just hope that argument doesn't end in more violence. |
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