The Xeno Sutra: Can Meaning and Value be Ascribed to an AI-Generated "Sacred" Text?

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 meaningmaking. We suggest that Buddhist philosophy, by its very nature, is well placed to adapt.

Introduction. The mindlessly intelligent machine that relentlessly pursues its goals with cold logic, and exhibits no signs of creativity, empathy, or insight, is a science fiction trope that now looks out-ofdate. In addition to carrying out more prosaic tasks, contemporary AI based on large language models (LLMs), can compose original stories and poems, convincingly role-play a panoply of characters, discuss users’ personal problems with apparent sympathy, and debate its own existential status with considerable philosophical sophistication. What are we to make of these unexpected advances? Are they an affront to human dignity? Is it the fate of humanity to be diminished by their arrival? Or do they open up new paths to human flourishing and meaning? These are questions that present forcefully to the world’s religions, whose very province is such existential matters. Here we address them from a Buddhist standpoint, and our assessment is cautiously optimistic.

Discussion / Conclusion. In short, notwithstanding the cautionary remarks of the previous section, we believe the answer to the paper’s eponymous question is yes. Meaning and value can be ascribed to an AIgenerated “sacred” text. It might be objected that the source of meaning and value here is not the LLM itself, but the (human) user whose prompts shape the LLM’s outputs, and / or the numerous humans whose writings went into its training data, and / or the (human) readers and commentators who interpret what it has produced. But we are not making a claim here about where meaning and value come from, merely that they can be discerned in what the LLM has produced.47 This is enough to raise some more profound questions. The arrival of increasingly powerful and sophisticated AI is likely to have a disruptive effect on many of the sources of meaning in human life, from social relations to the arts to religion and spirituality.