Contemplative Artificial Intelligence
Overview
Paper Summary
This paper proposes a framework for building ethical AI by incorporating principles from Buddhist philosophy, such as mindfulness, emptiness, non-duality, and boundless care. A pilot study showed that prompting LLMs with contemplative insights improved their performance on a harmful prompt benchmark and increased cooperation in a Prisoner's Dilemma task. However, the study's limited scope, reliance on extrinsic prompting, and lack of deeper integration of these principles into AI architecture warrant further investigation.
Explain Like I'm Five
This paper suggests that AI could be made more ethical by incorporating principles from Buddhist philosophy, like mindfulness and compassion. The idea is to build AI that inherently cares about reducing suffering, not just following rules.
Possible Conflicts of Interest
None identified.
Identified Limitations
Rating Explanation
This paper presents an interesting and novel approach to AI alignment by drawing inspiration from Buddhist contemplative traditions. The pilot study provides some preliminary evidence to support the potential benefits of this approach. However, several limitations exist, including a lack of detailed implementation specifics, the potential for misinterpretation of philosophical concepts, and the need for more rigorous empirical testing to validate the claims of improved alignment. As the pilot study uses extrinsic prompting only, it has limited impact.
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