Don’t believe everything you see: why Buddhist scepticism is vital in the age of generative AI | Bertin Huynh

The latest iteration of OpenAI’s video generator, Sora 2, spells troubling times for objective reality. Even before the introduction of generative AI, an increasingly polarised political atmosphere meant we could barely agree on the same set of facts.

But for Buddhists, reality has always been something to be sceptical about.

Take the heart sutra, a key passage of Buddhist teachings:

Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva,
while contemplating profoundly the Prajna Paramita,
Realised that the Five Skandhas are empty,
and thus he was able to overcome all suffering.

The thesis is that one of the Buddha’s disciples, Avalokiteśvara, realises that to overcome suffering he must recognise that the five skandhas – things that make up the human experience – are empty. The skandhas are:

• Form, all the things our sensory organs can smell, taste, see, feel and hear.

• Feelings that arise when we perceive things.

• Perception is the lens through which we label things and assign value or worth like bananas are delicious or this article is boring.

• Mental forces, or volition, are the actions and reactions to things and the feelings and perceptions that come from them.

• Consciousness is the last because it its the aggregate or heap of the rest together. It is our memories and the human hard drive from which we draw from to inform how we will respond to new forms, feelings and sensations.

Buddhists believe that human experience is a culmination of these things, and outside your own cognition there’s no certainty anything exists.

One of my Buddhism teachers, the Venerable Miao Guang from the Fo Guang Shan monastery in Taiwan, often used this image as an example:

She would ask us to describe it, what it should taste like and how we would feel about it. After saying how much we would love a scoop of ice-cream, she would then reveal to us that the photo was, in fact, butter. In a very simple way, she was showing us how our senses trick us. That what we think is objective reality is often clouded by the prejudices and memories that help us make sense of the world around us.

When I taught Buddhist scripture to teenagers and we got to this point in the teachings, the response I would often get was, “OK, so nothing is real and nothing matters”. After which I would begin to throw tennis balls at them asking, “So how real is this?”

Instead of encouraging nihilism, Buddhism invites us to see that the framework from which our reality comes from is empty. The point of this is to realise that nothing has an “inherent” or “eternal” nature, and believing so is to invite duhkha – suffering and dissatisfaction. Because our senses are so limited and the nature of all things so transient, what we know to be objective reality is a momentary snapshot of the whole picture. To realise the five skandhas are empty is to give yourself a chance to see reality as it is, rather than reality as we think it should be.

Generative AI throws a whole new spanner in that five-step process of constructing reality. Being sceptical of reality can only take you so far, just as the Buddha walked the middle path between luxury and poverty to realise his enlightenment, we can’t cling to this pessimistic point of view or we might get hit by a tennis ball.

Only by understanding the lived experiences of many do we even have any chance of seeing the full picture.

The heart sutra goes on to say:

No ignorance, nor its extinction;
No ageing and no death, nor their cessation.
No suffering, causes, cessation, nor the path.
No wisdom nor attainment.
As there is nothing to attain

What does this mean in a practical sense? It means don’t believe everything you see – especially on social media.