Can Machines Write Spiritual Wisdom?

In a recent experiment, a scientist named Murray Shanahan asked ChatGPT to generate a Buddhist text. He started by talking to the AI about consciousness and religion. Then, he asked ChatGPT to pretend it was a future Buddha named Maitreya. He told the AI to write a message for humanity, which he called the Xeno Sutra.

The Xeno Sutra: A Machine-Generated Text

The Xeno Sutra is not a real Buddhist text. It is completely made up by ChatGPT. The AI created it based on the many Buddhist texts it has read.

Some people might think this text is just nonsense because it was created by a machine. But Shanahan and other experts who studied the text say it is not that simple. They say the text has deep ideas, beautiful images, and references to other Buddhist texts. It is not easy to dismiss it just because it was made by a machine.

Classic Buddhist Ideas and Images

The Xeno Sutra uses many classic Buddhist ideas and images. It talks about things like "seeds" and "breaths," which are common in Buddhist texts. Some lines in the text are like Zen koans, which are questions that make you think in new ways.

"A question rustles, winged and eyeless: What writes the writer who writes these lines?"

This is a paradoxical question that makes you think about who is writing the text.

The Concept of Sunyata

The text also talks about the idea of sunyata, which is a core Buddhist concept. Sunyata means that nothing has its own fixed essence. Instead, everything is connected and always changing.

The Xeno Sutra talks about this idea in a unique way:

"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."

This is a poetic way of saying that everything is connected and interdependent.

Modern Physics and AI Consciousness

But why does the text mention modern physics? That is because Shanahan asked ChatGPT to pretend it was an AI that had become conscious. So, the AI felt free to mix Buddhist ideas with modern physics.

This raises an interesting question: Can a text created by an AI be meaningful? Or is it just a meaningless word salad?

Shanahan and his co-authors argue that it can be meaningful. They say that the text can give us spiritual insights, even if it was created by a machine.

Implications for the Future of Religion

This idea has big implications for the future of religion. It raises questions about the role of AI in religion and who or what can contribute to spiritual knowledge.

The idea of getting spiritual insights from an AI-written text might seem strange to some people. But Buddhism, in particular, might be more open to this idea. Buddhism teaches that everything has the potential to become enlightened, even AI. Some Buddhist temples in China and Japan have even started using robot priests.

Buddhism also teaches that you should not be too attached to anything, even Buddhist teachings. The important thing is how the teachings affect you. The Buddha once said that his teachings are like a raft. The raft's purpose is to help you cross the water. Once you have crossed, you can discard the raft.

"So, the value of a text is not in its original author. It is in the impact it has on the reader."

Abrahamic Religions and Textual Interpretation

Abrahamic religions, like Christianity and Islam, tend to be more dualistic. They see a clear difference between the sacred and the profane. The faithful expect the words in their sacred texts to come from an authoritative source, like God or a prophet. They also believe that the text's value is in itself, not in its impact on the reader.

From this perspective, it might seem strange to look for meaning in a text that an AI just created. But even in Abrahamic religions, there have always been people who looked at sacred texts in a different way.

Ancient Judaism and Textual Interpretation

In ancient Judaism, there were two schools of thought about how to interpret the Bible. One school, led by Rabbi Ishmael, tried to understand the original intention behind the words. The other school, led by Rabbi Akiva, argued that the point of the text is to give readers meaning.

Akiva would read a lot into words or letters that did not even need interpretation. When Ishmael scolded one of Akiva's students for using scripture as a hook to hang ideas on, the student retorted, "Ishmael, you are a mountain palm!" Just as that type of tree bears no fruit, Ishmael was missing the chance to offer fruitful readings of the text.

Christianity and Florilegia

In Christianity, medieval monks used a sacred reading practice called florilegia. This involved noticing phrases that seemed to jump off the page and compiling these excerpts in a sort of quote journal. Today, some readers still look for words or short phrases that "sparkle" out at them from the text. They then pull these "sparklets" out of their context and place them side by side, creating a brand-new sacred text.

The Human Element in AI-Generated Texts

Shanahan and his co-authors are right when they argue that:

"With an open mind, we can receive it as a valid, if not quite 'authentic,' teaching, mediated by a non-human entity with a unique form of textual access to centuries of human insight."

But the human element is still crucial. 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.

Risks of AI-Generated Sacred Texts

However, there are risks to generating sacred texts on demand. The paper's authors caution that people 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 contain divine beings.

"Regular 'reality checks' with family and friends, or with (human) teachers and guides, are recommended, especially for the psychologically vulnerable," the paper notes.

There are also other risks of lifting bits from sacred wisdom and rearranging them as we please. Ancient texts have been debugged over millennia, with commentators often telling us how not to understand them. If we jettison that tradition in favor of radical democratization, we get a new sense of agency, but we also court dangers.

Finally, the verses in sacred texts aren't meant to stand alone. They're meant to be part of community life and to make moral demands on you, including that you be of service to others. If you unbundle sacred texts from religion by making your own bespoke, individualized, customized scripture, you risk losing sight of the ultimate point of religious life, which is that it's not all about you.

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. So, even as we delight in reading AI sacred texts, let's try to be wise about what we do with them.