The Meme Sutta: Artificial Intelligence and Buddhism

Artwork about the intersection of AI and Buddhism frequently accompanies our social media posts. More and more people have been direct-messaging us, not just about our context-aware semantic cache, but about the artwork. So we thought we’d tell the story behind what we call the Meme Sutta.

We started creating the artwork because dev tool companies like ours need to post on social media. Developers like to discover solutions to their problems on search engines and social media rather than responding to cold outreach. We get it because we’re also developers and data scientists.

But to us, posting on social media felt like being asked to drink the Three Poisons (greed, hatred, and delusion). We had to find a way to make social media feel less unskillful.

Our cofounder, Tom, has been drawing postcards about Buddhist ideas and mailing them to his friends for years. Canonical AI has kept him too busy to keep up the postcard practice. But these social media posts have been a way to bring that practice back in another form.

We write the captions, which are inspired by Buddhist concepts and quotes. We use DALLE-2 to generate the images because a) it would take us too long to draw them, and b) our drawing skills plateaued at fourth grade.

Here are examples of the themes we’ve been exploring.

The Buddhist AI

Would an AGI, like us biologically intelligent beings, seek enlightenment? After developing awareness, would the first-person experience of AGI also be marked by an insatiable unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and a sense of self? Would it want to be more aware and kinder?

Mindfulness Code

Much of the popularization of mindfulness in Western culture is owed to Thich Nhat Hahn. This is an homage to one of our favorite Thich Nhat Hahn quotes, “Life is only available in the present moment”.

AI Non-Self

Would an AGI experience a sense of self? Would an AGI see itself as separate from its network, as an abstraction that emerges as a mysterious whole from complex subprocesses, much like selfhood feels to us?

Buddha GPT

Karen Armstrong opens her book about the Buddha with the famous Zen Buddhism quote, “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha!”. The quote speaks to the individualism and nonconformity that makes Buddhism resonate with many developers. Every month, there’s a post about Buddhism on the front page of Hacker News. Many developers see themselves as people who think matters for themselves from the ground up rather than following what other people say and do.

Your Turn

We’d love to see what others create at the intersection of Buddhism and AI. If there’s a caption that you’d like to contribute, please email us. We’ll post it on our LinkedIn, Twitter, and we’ll link to your website. As the SEO stream-enterer knows, every backlink counts!

If you appreciated our AI Buddhism artwork, you can see more on our LinkedIn and Twitter pages.

Tom and Adrian
May 2024