The Xeno Sutra: Can Meaning and Value be Ascribed to an AI-Generated "Sacred" Text?
This is an incremental study that addresses the philosophical and societal implications of AI-generated content for fields like philosophy, literature, and ethics.
The paper tackles the problem of AI-generated sacred texts by creating and analyzing a fictional Buddhist sutra with a large language model, finding that its conceptual subtlety and rich imagery challenge easy dismissal based on its mechanistic origin, raising societal questions about technology's role in human meaning-making.
This paper presents a case study in the use of a large language model to generate a fictional Buddhist "sutra"', and offers a detailed analysis of the resulting text from a philosophical and literary point of view. 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. This raises questions about how we, as a society, should come to terms with the potentially unsettling possibility of a technology that encroaches on human meaning-making. We suggest that Buddhist philosophy, by its very nature, is well placed to adapt.