AI is exploding. The underlying ideas have existed since the 1980s, but it is only with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT that it rose to dominate tech discourse. In the past, I have been interested in learning about the technology, and excited about possibilities. As time goes on, however, I have grown increasingly skeptical, to the point where I now believe that we need to ban the very existence of “strong AI” or “AGI”, by which I mean any computer agent that appears human. Even the weaker, but still powerful, forms of AI available today have over-hyped benefits and under-appreciated harms.
I’ll discuss these things later on, but for now, I want to make a firm proposal. SuttaCentral in all its aspects, including this forum, should make a commitment to being 100% free of AI content. No machine generated content should be allowed in any of our platforms, promotions, data repos, or anywhere else. This applies even if edited by a human. That does not mean that there cannot be any AI behind the scenes, for example as coding assistants, search, and the like. Such things have drawbacks and benefits, and it is practically impossible to avoid them completely at this point. So the ban affects actual presence of machine-generated text.
One reason for this is that, very rapidly, the internet is being filled with AI slop. A torrent of websites, apps, blogs, forums, spam, social media, advertising, you name it, is full of machine generated gunk. This ruins the entire digital landscape, starting with search engines. Very soon, if not already, human-generated “content” (O how I loathe that word!) will be swamped by AI slop, and the “better” the AI gets the harder it will be to tell the difference. The corollary of this is that in no long time, the few bastions of genuine humanity will be prized like precious gems.
As to use of our content by others, in particular scraping translation data to use for machine translations, this is not something that we can legally prevent. Even if there were copyright protections—which there are not as of yet—then our permissive CC0 license allows any kind of usage.
Nonetheless, we do ask that people use our work in the spirit of the Buddhist tradition. This, in my view, rules out any human-imitating AI applications such as a “Buddhist chatbot” or “AI translations”. The Buddhist tradition has always regarded translation as a sacred activity, and the texts produced as the Buddha’s words. Translations require not merely linguistic knowledge, but a deep understanding of the Dhamma and its expression.
I therefore ask that our content be left out of such projects. If someone wants to make a “Buddhist” chatbot or similar, I request that not only should they not add our work, they should not use general products like ChatGPT that already contain it. I also request that they delete any models trained on our work, as well as any textual corpus that has been generated with it.
So we should make this strong commitment and advertise it, badging our websites and books as “Not By AI”. There are already projects that do this, showing how broad the concern is.
If someone believes that AI has major benefits that we are missing out on, then great: build it yourself and prove me wrong.