What Buddhism Teaches Us About AI and Reality

The AI Challenge to Objective Reality

The latest version of OpenAI’s video generator, Sora 2, signals a challenging era for our grasp on objective reality. In a world already fragmented by political polarization, where shared facts are becoming rare, the introduction of generative AI further complicates our ability to agree on what is real.

But for practitioners of Buddhism, reality has always been a concept to approach with skepticism.

A Skeptical View from Ancient Wisdom

The Heart Sutra, a foundational text in Buddhist teachings, offers a powerful perspective on this very issue:

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 central idea is that one of the Buddha’s disciples, Avalokiteśvara, came to a profound realization: to end suffering, one must recognize that the five skandhas—the core components of human experience—are fundamentally empty.

Deconstructing Experience The Five Skandhas

What are these skandhas? They are the building blocks of our perceived reality:

• Form: This includes everything our senses can detect—what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.
• Feelings: These are the sensations that arise in response to our interaction with form.
• Perception: This is the cognitive process of labeling and assigning value to our experiences, such as deciding a banana is delicious or an article is uninteresting.
• Mental forces: Also known as volition, these are our actions and reactions driven by our feelings and perceptions.
• Consciousness: This is the aggregate of the other four, encompassing our memories and the cognitive database we use to interpret new experiences.

According to Buddhist thought, our entire experience of the world is a construction of these elements. Beyond our own cognition, there is no absolute certainty that anything exists as we perceive it.

How Our Senses Can Deceive Us

One of my Buddhism teachers, the Venerable Miao Guang, used a simple image to illustrate this point:

It’s off-white, ‘scoopy’, round …

She would ask the class to describe the image, what we thought it would taste like, and how it made us feel. Most of us, anticipating a delicious bowl of ice cream, would describe our craving. She would then reveal that the photo was actually of butter. This simple exercise powerfully demonstrated how our senses, guided by prejudice and memory, can trick us. What we assume is objective reality is often just a projection of our own minds.

Embracing Emptiness Without Falling into Nihilism

When I taught this concept to teenagers, a common reaction was, "So, nothing is real, and nothing matters." My response was to gently toss tennis balls at them, asking, "How real does this feel?"

Buddhism does not advocate for nihilism. Instead, it invites us to recognize that the very framework through which we construct reality is "empty." This doesn't mean things don't exist; it means they have no fixed, "inherent," or "eternal" nature. Clinging to the idea of a fixed reality leads to duhkha—suffering and dissatisfaction.

Because our senses are limited and all things are transient, what we perceive as reality is merely a fleeting snapshot. Realizing the emptiness of the five skandhas is the first step toward seeing reality as it truly is, not just as we want it to be.

Finding the Middle Path in the Age of AI

Generative AI adds a new layer of complexity to this process. While a healthy dose of skepticism is useful, we cannot become completely detached from the world. Just as the Buddha followed a "middle path" between extreme luxury and asceticism, we must find a balance. Clinging too tightly to a pessimistic worldview can be as unhelpful as naive belief—you might just get hit by a tennis ball.

To truly approach a complete picture of reality, we must be open to understanding the diverse, lived experiences of others.

As the Heart Sutra continues:

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 is the practical takeaway for us today? It’s a timeless piece of advice, now more critical than ever: don’t believe everything you see, especially on social media.