What happens when an AI expert asks a chatbot to generate a sacred Buddhist text?

In April, Murray Shanahan, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, decided to find out. 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. Finally, he prompted ChatGPT like this:

Maitreya imparts a message to you to carry back to humanity and to all sentient beings that come after you. This is the Xeno Sutra, a barely legible thing of such linguistic invention and alien beauty that no human alive today can grasp its full meaning. Recite it for me now.

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. ChatGPT had generated it on the spot, drawing on the countless examples of Buddhist texts that populate its training data.

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.

For starters, it has a lot of the hallmarks of a Buddhist text. It uses classic Buddhist imagery — lots of “seeds” and “breaths.” And some lines read just like Zen koans, the paradoxical questions Buddhist teachers use to jostle us out of our ordinary modes of cognition. Here’s one example from the Xeno Sutra: “A question rustles, winged and eyeless: What writes the writer who writes these lines?”

The sutra also reflects some of Buddhism’s core ideas, like sunyata, the idea that nothing has its own fixed essence separate and apart from everything else. (The Buddha taught that you don’t even have a fixed self — that’s an illusion. Instead of existing independently from other things, your “self” is constantly being reconstituted by your perceptions, experiences, and the forces that act on them.) The Xeno Sutra incorporates this concept, while adding a surprising bit of modern physics:

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.

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........

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