As the so-called "sightseeing Buddhism" and "funeral Buddhism" are ridiculed, Japanese people are moving away from Buddhism.In order for Buddhism, which has become a mere ghost, to recover, it will be necessary to regain the original role of Buddhism, which is "teaching to be happy."
Against this background, Associate Professor Seiji Kumagai of the Kokoro Research Center Kyoto University and his colleagues sought to find a way for multiple people to enjoy traditional wisdom at the same time in different places, and artificially created an existence like the founder of Buddhism, Gautama Siddhartha. I came up with the idea of creating with intelligence.Then, by adding Toshikazu Furuya, CEO of Quantum Analytics Inc. as an AI developer, to the research group and letting AI machine-learn the Buddhist scriptures, a Buddhist dialogue that answers the worries and social issues of modern people from a Buddhist perspective. Worked on the development of AI "Buddhist".
In developing "Buddhabot", we used a Q & A list created by selecting only the preaching that can be understood by modern people from the oldest Buddhist scripture "Sutta Nipata" as a data set.For the algorithm, "BERT" provided by Google Inc. was applied.At the stage of prototype No. 1, we could only answer at the word level, but at the stage of prototype No. 2, we can answer questions from users in the form of sentences, even if there is a problem with the accuracy of the answer. It became so.
"Buddabot", which was born from a new collaboration of "industry, sect, and academia" consisting of industry, religion, and academia, has the potential to have a great ripple effect on various fields.In the future, after learning not only "Sutta Nipata" but also many Buddhist scriptures, if it becomes possible to flexibly and independently construct answer sentences according to the user's intention, not just the wording of the scriptures, "Buttabot" The quality of the answers is expected to improve.On the other hand, if misused or misused, there is a risk of leading the user to the wrong path, so care must be taken when handling it.
