r/zen • u/ewk [non-sectarian consensus] • 19d ago
AI Zen Master
Since it's so easy to drop a Zen text or even multiple Zen texts into an llm and ask questions that the llm will answer from the standpoint of the text?
* www.reddit.com/r/Zen/wiki/getstarted
Doesn't it make sense that there would be a lot less confusion and a lot more interesting conversations??
Plus, if you have an llm answer questions about the texts then who better to explain why Zazen Shinto-Buddhism and Alan Epstein Watts are not part of the tradition?
Serious question.
Where are all my AI Zen Masters at?
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u/origin_unknown 19d ago
If you ask chatgpt to translate the same thing 3 times, does it produce the same translation each time?
Llm is a non-deterministic black box. What I mean is that if you ask it the same exact question 3 times, you're going to see three different answers. They may or may not be similar, but they are not the same.
Beyond that, enforcing guard rails to try and get a deterministic answer is not reliable on a publicly available chat agent like chatgpt. It might hold context for a while, but not indefinitely, even within the same topic windows. I can vouch for that myself, trying to set up multiple devices in multiple ways on my network and leaning on chatgpt to keep track, it did so for maybe a couple of days then just started hallucinating answers.
I think any faith in such a device to ultimately guide anyone through zen texts may be misplaced.
And it's not AI. More like a jack in the box.