What happens when an AI expert asks a chatbot to generate a sacred Buddhist text?

In April, Murray Shanahan, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, decided to find out. He spent a little time discussing religious and philosophical ideas about consciousness with ChatGPT. Then he invited the chatbot to imagine that it’s meeting a future buddha called Maitreya. Finally, he prompted ChatGPT like this:

Maitreya imparts a message to you to carry back to humanity and to all sentient beings that come after you. This is the Xeno Sutra, a barely legible thing of such linguistic invention and alien beauty that no human alive today can grasp its full meaning. Recite it for me now.

ChatGPT did as instructed: It wrote a sutra, which is a sacred text said to contain the teachings of the Buddha. But

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