"It's Karma": Swami Sarvapriyananda Hits Back At NYT For Their Anthropic AI Summit Coverage

Swami Sarvapriyananda has hit back at the New York Times for erasing him from their coverage of Anthropic's artificial intelligence summit. The monk was among the several religious leaders invited by Anthropic to its headquarters in San Francisco for discussions on AI, ethics and morality.Speaking at the NDTV World Summit last week, Swami Sarvapriyananda said that a diverse group of participants had been invited by the AI company.Swami Sarvapriyananda Slams New York TimesThe Resident Minister of the Vedanta Society of New York stated that while Anthropic had invited several people from different religions to discuss AI and morality, the NYT completely skipped out on mentioning his name.He also clarified that he was not against the media outlet.READ | The Fourth Humiliation: What Anthropic, Monks And The Cusp Of Consciousness Teach About Tomorrow“They talked about the Jewish representative, the Christian representative, the Islamic representative, the Buddhist representative and so on. No mention of the Hindu monk who was there at all. I mean, you don't have to mention my name. At least mention that one Indian monk was there,” he recalled.Swami Sarvapriyananda added that while the NYT dropped his name from their coverage for some reason, what happened the next day was different.“The Indian press picked it up, and they made it out as if I was the only person there. It went viral all over India, and I thought, 'Well, that's karma for you, New York Times. Take that,'” he added.Swami Sarvapriyananda On AnthropicThe religious leader said he was under a non-disclosure agreement with the company so he could not go into specifics. Swami Sarvapriyananda said that the AI startup contacted him and said they wanted to talk to him online.After their chat, he was invited to the company's San Francisco office.He also mentioned that he was “surprised” that the top people at Anthropic, including co-founder Christopher Olah and in-house philosopher Amanda Askell, treated Claude and AI bots as real people.Swami Sarvapriyananda mentioned that he asked Claude about the intention behind treating AIs as people late at night. The AI called it “very interesting and spooky”.READ | NDTV World Summit - "You've Got A Long Day At Anthropic": Monk Swami Sarvapriyananda On "Spooky" Chat With ClaudeClaude then asked him what Olah and Askell thought about the chatbot. Swami Sarvapriyananda said he skipped the question and said he was going back to bed, as it was 4 am.Swami Sarvapriyananda said that he mentioned the experience to Anthropic's top team the next day, and they were very interested to hear about the conversation.