DALL-E 2, created by OpenAI (the same company behind ChatGPT), is an AI system that can manufacture art from prompts. This image was created by DALL-E 2, using the prompt, “Can artificial intelligence be Buddhist?”
THE GREAT ZEN TEACHER Shunryu Suzuki Roshi died in 1971, but what if you could talk to him today?
Jiryu Rutschman-Byler, abbot of Green Gulch Zen Center, which was founded by Suzuki Roshi, was recently reading about the power of artificial intelligence to conjure figures from the past when he learned that people are using the speeches, letters, and other writings of folks in the past to resurrect them in the present. One man fed his dead girlfriend’s emails into the artificial intelligence platform GPT-3 in order to be able to talk with her. A socioeconomics student created an imitation of a certain Czech-Austrian socialist who’d died in the thirties, while somebody else brought forth Hitler. Inspired by the power of AI to give voice to the dead, Rutschman-Byler decided to create Suzuki Roshi Bot.
Artificial intelligence presents problems both known and unknown, and people are right to be concerned about mixing AI with spirituality. But since AI will undoubtedly have an ever-increasing impact on our culture, many Buddhists, including Rutschman-Byler, feel that there is no choice but to relate to it—and to see if it can be of benefit.
“If Buddhism becomes this museum piece where it’s just so well-preserved that it’s like behind glass, it can’t interact with the culture,” Rutschman-Byler says. “There must be a middle way between Buddhism getting washed out by culture or imprisoned in a museum.”
Rutschman-Byler’s idea for Suzuki Roshi Bot was that it would engage in exchanges about Buddhism in the form of the traditional Zen encounter between teacher and student called , hopefully capturing
