While recent developments in large language models have improved bias detection and classification, sensitive subjects like religion still present challenges because even minor errors can result in severe misunderstandings. In particular, multilingual models often misrepresent religions and have difficulties being accurate in religious contexts. To address this, we introduce BRAND: Bilingual Religious Accountable Norm Dataset, which focuses on the four main religions of South Asia: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, containing over 2,400 entries, and we used three different types of prompts in both English and Bengali. Our results indicate that models perform better in English than in Bengali and consistently display bias toward Islam, even when answering religion-neutral questions. These findings highlight persistent bias in multilingual models when similar questions are asked in different languages. We further connect our findings to the broader issues in HCI regarding religion and spirituality.

This paper presents a case study in the use of a large language model to generate a fictional Buddhist "sutra"', and offers a detailed analysis of the resulting text from a philosophical and literary point of view. The conceptual subtlety, rich imagery, and density of allusion found in the text make it hard to causally dismiss on account of its mechanistic origin. This raises questions about how we, as a society, should come to terms with the potentially unsettling possibility of a technology that encroaches on human meaning-making. We suggest that Buddhist philosophy, by its very nature, is well placed to adapt.

An artificial intelligence-based chatbot will start answering questions from a Buddhist viewpoint in English in Bhutan, its developers including a Kyoto University professor said Monday. The team of the university and a startup initially developed a chatbot called Buddhabot in 2021 with the Japanese translation of the Sutta Nipata, considered to be the oldest collection of discourses of Buddha. Data on other classic collections were also incorporated into the AI Buddha later. In 2023, the team remodeled the Buddhabot using OpenAI's ChatGPT generative AI to create Buddhabot Plus, which adds interpretations and explanations to the discourses. The English version of Buddhabot Plus was completed last year following the Bhutanese government's request.

Note: This paper includes examples of potentially offensive content related to religious bias, presented solely for academic purposes. The widespread adoption of language models highlights the need for critical examinations of their inherent biases, particularly concerning religion. This study systematically investigates religious bias in both language models and text-to-image generation models, analyzing both open-source and closed-source systems. We construct approximately 400 unique, naturally occurring prompts to probe language models for religious bias across diverse tasks, including mask filling, prompt completion, and image generation. Our experiments reveal concerning instances of underlying stereotypes and biases associated disproportionately with certain religions. Additionally, we explore cross-domain biases, examining how religious bias intersects with demographic factors such as gender, age, and nationality. This study further evaluates the effectiveness of targeted debiasing techniques by employing corrective prompts designed to mitigate the identified biases. Our findings demonstrate that language models continue to exhibit significant biases in both text and image generation tasks, emphasizing the urgent need to develop fairer language models to achieve global acceptability.

Buddhism means different things to different cultures. To Westerners, Buddhism is generally associated with spirituality, meditation, and philosophy, while many Vietnamese associate it with the lunar calendar, holidays, mother god worship, and a lifestyle capable of bringing good luck. In Nepal, people typically see Buddhism as a protector that destroys bad karma. To move beyond these local views in an attempt to see the global picture, you might type "Buddhism" in Google's search bar. Instead of helping, however, the top 50 results skew strongly toward these distinct cultural impressions depending on the language you use for your query.

Contrary to Google Search's mission of delivering information from "many angles so you can form your own understanding of the world," we find that Google and its most prominent returned results - Wikipedia and YouTube - simply reflect a narrow set of cultural stereotypes tied to the search language for complex topics like "Buddhism," "Liberalism," "colonization," "Iran" and "America." Simply stated, they present, to varying degrees, distinct information across the same search in different languages, a phenomenon we call 'language bias.' This paper presents evidence and analysis of language bias and discusses its larger social implications. Instead of presenting a global picture of a complex topic, our online searches and emerging tools like ChatGPT turn us into the proverbial blind person touching a small portion of an elephant, ignorant of the existence of other cultural perspectives. Piecing together a genuine depiction of the elephant is a challenging and important endeavor that will require collaborative efforts from scholars in both the humanities and technology.

Artificial intelligence brought the late Steve Jobs back from the dead for a fabricated interview with Joe Rogan that focuses on the Apple founder's religious beliefs, success and experience while taking lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). The nearly 20-minute discussion, featured on Podcast.ai, was generated with text-to-voice software that used previous recordings of both to create a coherent and cohesive interaction. The podcast host opens the discussion by praising Jobs for his innovations before likening him to Patrick Swayze in the movie'Ghost' and calling Jobs'a memory from the past' - then the pair dive into a deeper conversation. The late Apple founder recalls the time he took LSD and how it was a'profound experience for him' in which Rogan then asks Jobs what he learned from taking the elicit drug. 'It reinforced my sense of what was important.

Buddhism is an influential religion with a long-standing history and profound philosophy. Nowadays, more and more people worldwide aspire to learn the essence of Buddhism, attaching importance to Buddhism dissemination. However, Buddhist scriptures written in classical Chinese are obscure to most people and machine translation applications. For instance, general Chinese-English neural machine translation (NMT) fails in this domain. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to building a practical NMT model for Buddhist scriptures. The performance of our translation pipeline acquired highly promising results in ablation experiments under three criteria.

Teraverse, a project based at Kyoto University's Institute for the Future of Human Society (IFOHS), aims to bring Buddhism to the forthcoming "metaverse," an initiative heralded by Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook Inc.) as the future of the internet. The Teraverse project will bring Buddhist art, philosophy, ritual, and practice to a globally available online community in the metaverse. Associate professor of Buddhist Studies and Tibetan Studies at Kyoto University, Seiji Kumagai explained: "With the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukrainian-Russian war, more and more people are feeling the pressure of the real world." He noted that the Buddhist metaverse was aimed at offering "new ways to blend traditional knowledge and science. As an option in today's diversified society, we hope they can bring understanding and enjoyment to people, creating new vitality and hope, and building a more vibrant society."

The explosive growth of artificial intelligence has fostered hope that it will help us solve many of the world's most intractable problems. However, there's also much concern about the power of AI, and growing agreement that its use should be guided to avoid infringing upon our rights. Many groups have discussed and proposed ethical guidelines for how AI should be developed or deployed: IEEE, a global professional organization for engineers, has issued a 280-page document on the subject (to which I contributed), and the European Union has published its own framework. The AI Ethics Guidelines Global Inventory has compiled more than 160 such guidelines from around the world. Unfortunately, most of these guidelines are developed by groups or organizations concentrated in North America and Europe: a survey published by social scientist Anna Jobin and her colleagues found 21 in the US, 19 in the EU, 13 in the UK, four in Japan, and one each from the United Arab Emirates, India, Singapore, and South Korea.