What it’s like to watch an IBM AI successfully debate humans
Project Debater will argue with you and make jokes
At a small event in San Francisco last night, IBM hosted two debate club-style discussions between two humans and an AI called “Project Debater.” The goal was for the AI to engage in a series of reasoned arguments according to some pretty standard rules of debate: no awareness of the debate topic ahead of time, no pre-canned responses. Each side gave a four-minute introductory speech, a four-minute rebuttal to the other’s arguments, and a two-minute closing statement.
Project Debater held its own.
It looks like a huge leap beyond that other splashy demonstration we all remember from IBM when Watson mopped the floor with its competition at Jeopardy. IBM’s AI demonstration today was built on that foundation. It had many corpora of data it could draw from, just like Watson did back in the day. And like Watson, it was able to analyze the contents of all that data to come up with the relevant answer. But this time, the “answer” was cogent points related to subsidizing space and telemedicine laid out in a four-minute speech defending each.
Project Debater cited sources, pandered to the audience’s affinity for children and veterans, and did a passable job of cracking a relevant joke or two in the process.
That’s pretty impressive. It essentially created a freshman-level term paper kind of argument in just a couple of minutes when presented with a debating topic it had no specific preparation for.
...it was able to move from the “present information” mode we usually think of when we hear AI to a “make an argument” mode. But what impressed me more was that it attempted to directly argue with points that its human opponents made, in nearly real time. (The system needed a couple minutes to analyze the human’s four-minute speech before it could respond.)
It frankly made me feel a little unsettled, but not because of the usual worries like “robots are going to become self-aware and take over” or “AI is coming for our jobs.” It was something subtler and harder to put my finger on. For maybe the first time, I felt like an AI was trying to dissemble. I didn’t see it lie, nor do I think it tried to trick us, but it did engage in a debating tactic that, if you saw a human try it, would make you trust that human a little bit less.
What Project Debater didn’t do was directly engage the criteria set forth by its human opponent. And here’s the thing: if I were in that debate, I wouldn’t have done so either. It’s a strong debating tactic to set the framework of debate, and accepting that framework is often a recipe for losing.
Another IBM researcher suggested that this technology could help judge fake news.
How close is this to being something IBM turns into a product? “This is still a research-level project,” Welser says, though “the technologies underneath it right now” are already beginning to be used in IBM projects.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/18/17477686/ibm-project-debater-ai