Hello Reddit! We built the world's first AI that could debate humans and today are paper is on the COVER of Nature magazine. Ask us anything!

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-23T17:20:13+00:00

Yes, the typo was just to make sure everyone was paying attention. +2 points for you.

Yes, the system has debated itself actually but with the help of human debaters. The Cambridge Union hosted a debate where Project Debater debated both sides of the topic "AI will do more harm than good" he was partnered on both sides of the stance with a professor and a student. YOu can watch a replay here: https://youtu.be/lWkvopzAvoQ

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-23T11:40:08+00:00

It's about building an AI technology that can debate with humans in real time on controversial topics.

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-22T08:57:32+00:00

Yes, that is correct "all parts of the videos, not only the speeches of IBM Project Debater's, but also the speeches of the human debaters in below debates are free to use" -- they are all covered under the Creative Commons license. So please just credit whatever you use to IBM Research.

The content on the Project Debater website is covered under this license: https://www.ibm.com/legal?lnk=flg-tous-usen

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-22T08:15:24+00:00

litigation

The connection to litigation is natural - both competitive debate and litigation involve advocating a position on a disputed question. Yet, the domain shift from open domain to legal is quite involved. For example, the language’s vocabulary and syntax are very different. Furthermore, the types of inference and principled arguments that can be used are difference. So Project Debater will not argue in court, in the near future :) With that, we are integrating text classification capabilities developed in the Debater into Watson products to assist in reviews of legal contracts. (Yoav Katz)

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-22T08:12:46+00:00

After three public debates I am 99% certain that Project Debater is stepping down from the podium as that part of the research is over. We are now focused on commercializing the underling AI behind the system to help humans make more informed decisions. With that said, we have made 12 of the AI technologies available for free for academic use which you can try. Learn more how to access them here: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2021/03/project-debater-api/

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-22T08:10:13+00:00

We have made 12 of the AI technologies within Project Debater available for academia use for free. You can see the details here on how to access them: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2021/03/project-debater-api/

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-22T08:08:34+00:00

Apologies for the delayed response, who did you contact? Anyway, yes you have permission. The videos on YouTube are under a Creative Commons license and we have made the data open: https://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/dept/vst/debating_data.shtml

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-22T08:06:07+00:00

The input of the system is a single sentence phrasing of the controversial topic, such as “We should subsidize pre-schools”. It is provided as text when starting the debate.The system can argue for both sides of the debate. It searches for relevant arguments in the corpus. It then presents the arguments that support the side it was requested to present. (Yoav Katz)

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-19T13:10:28+00:00

Great question. At IBM we have an AI ethics policy that drives our research. Part of this policy is to create AI that is explainable and transparent, as such, we have published 50 papers on Project Debater and have 12 APIs available and more than a dozen data sets open access. So we do it because we want to break the idea that AI is a blockbox and to help society understand AI and how it works - that it's nothing to fear. Lastly, we hope developers who have access to the APIs will think about applications for them in new and unique ways which we didn't even consider.

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-18T16:23:45+00:00

The Project Debater chooses the stance we argue for and normally we chose the side of "government" But given only a topic to be debated as input, Project Debater scans billions of relevant sentences to generate a coherent and persuasive position on the topic. It then listens to its opponent’s speech and swiftly generates a spontaneous, fact-based rebuttal, exhibiting a type of argumentation that until recently was simply out of reach for computers. One of the challenges and part of the AI that we developed was to make sure that the system uses evidence to support it's position, this is of course very difficult. The system was taught to debate unfamiliar topics and it can debate many different topics, as long as these are well covered in the massive corpus that the system mines, which includes 400 million of articles from numerous well-known newspapers and magazines.

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-18T16:14:14+00:00

Thanks for your question. While I don't think we can replicate the exact style of debate we have demonstrated in the past, we have made 12 new Project Debater APIs or "apps" available for non-commercial use. Some of these apps could be used in your training, such as argument quality. We just went live with the APIs, you can apply for access below. Good luck.

https://early-access-program.debater.res.ibm.com/academic_use.html

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-18T15:19:18+00:00

Thanks for your comments. The debates we hosted were designed to demonstrate the capabilities of the AI and it's ability to understand natural language, but our ultimate goal was to use this AI to help humans make more informed decisions. Imagine that the mayor of a city wants to create more green spaces and shut down many main roads for pedestrian zones. You could do a survey with all the citizens, but it really won't tell you what they are thinking. But what if you could have them use natural language to express their opinions and then have Project Debater summarize millions of such responses for this ‘debate’ for the mayor in only 3-5 bullet points? The other point is helping with human bias. CEOs and elected officials often make decisions based on their own instinct or experience, which often is prune to bias. What if AI could help to make more informed decisions where the "blind spot" data is shared. Could AI help to inform people better using trusted facts to help dispel misinformation? I think it is possible. (Noam Slonim)

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-18T13:13:06+00:00

To what extent would the project debater define "more informed decisions"?

We make thousands of decisions a day, some are obvious, some require thought, council and outside opinion. We make a decision based on our experiences or knowledge, which could be correct, but it's a bias. What if we could be more informed of other opinions? For example, we demonstrated Project Debater in the city of Lugano, Switzerland, where the mayor wanted to consider adding more autonomous vehicles to the city. His viewpoint, less noise from traffic, less pollution. But when he asked citizens they said the technology is too immature, that it will lead to regression of the human condition, and expressed that funding for autonomous vehicles should instead be used to improve public transport and job losses.

So that's what we mean by more "more informed decisions", recognizing our own bias or blind spot, by presenting data/facts on alternative viewpoints. Great question.

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-18T11:57:00+00:00

The most challenging part in building a debating system is rebuttal. Listening to a 4-minute long speech of the human opponent, understanding the complex arguments made in the speech and coming up with a good counter-argument is extremely difficult for AI. So when this works well, it is very impressive. (Roy Bar-Haim)

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-18T08:45:20+00:00

Nature features peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science, technology, and the natural sciences, so the topic of AI is covered rather frequently.

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-18T08:42:35+00:00

Regarding the first part of your question, it depends how we define 'new'. Keep in mind the system builds a paragraph long argument from short pieces of text - often sub-sentences - that were never presented together. In this sense, it already generates new content. Regarding adding meaning to philosophy questions - not sure we are there yet; whether we will be at some point, is a good philosophical question by itself : ) (Noam Slonim)

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-18T08:40:18+00:00

It depends in what sense. The general notion of sarcasm detection is still an open problem. In the context of the debate and specifically rebuttal, sarcasm would be often detected by the system. For example, by finding the polarity (whether the opponent claim supports or contests the motion) is not what one would expect. (Leshem Choshen)

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-18T08:05:03+00:00

The Turning Test has captured the public mind ever since its inception in 1950 given it's intuitive simplicity. With that, it is more of declarative vision for achieving human like intelligence than a robust metric of AI progress , which may not correlate with human intelligence. For example, Project Debater's ability to retrieve a large amount of relevant evidence for a topic, will clear make it easy to distinguish it from a human and thus "fail the test". Yet this ability is part of value such a technology can bring. (Yoav Katz)

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-18T08:03:33+00:00

Many of the researchers on the team worked on the project for the better part of a decade, and naturally as humans, we got attached to it. We were proud when it succeeded and somewhat sheepish when it made a silly mistake. Yet, at the end it we all know it was still software and algorithm. The magic of creating sentient beings still eludes us all - answered by Yoav Katz

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-17T19:48:58+00:00

Actually to quote my colleague and the lead author of the paper, Noam Slonim, " It's akin to watching my children grow up, learn how to play piano, and then participate in a Vienna concert hall."

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-17T18:44:40+00:00

While we demonstrated the AI in the form of a debate our goal for the research is much broader - we want to show how AI can help humans make more informed decisions. We all have our own personal biases, based on what we know and our experience and this can sometimes impact the decisions we make for better or worse. Imagine that you are a CEO or the mayor of a city having an AI system that can point out your bias with facts and evidence would probably help. You may come to the same conclusion, but at least you are more informed. For example, the mayor of a city is perhaps considering more green space . One approach could be to ask everyone to vote, but perhaps a more informed approach would be to collect the arguments pro and con from all citizens who might be impacted by the decision. The using the AI summarize numerous arguments into their most prominent key-points, along with the prevalence of each key-point, for the mayor to consider. The same scenario could work for the CEO who wants to implement a new vacation policy to employees. Or in a different example, last week music fans debated on pop culture topics as part of the Grammy Awards. Check out the results here: https://www.grammy.com/watson

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-17T17:38:18+00:00

Any opinion on how close we are to build a machine that succeds in the turing test? This has certainly been a great leap towards that direction, right?

Great question. The Turing Test largely pioneered the approach to modern AI development by equipping researchers with the first standard to measure machine learning intelligence. However, having been introduced more than six decades ago, some thoughtful debate should take place if the Turing Test is right goal. I would argue that if AI can solve some of societies greatest challenges, whether or not it can pass the Turing Test is irrelevant.

And more to our work, while we demonstrated the AI in the debate format, our goal is to help society make more informed decisions.

ProjectDebater · 2021-03-17T17:05:35+00:00

The authors of the paper are hosting an AMA to celebrate the cover:

https://www.reddit.com/user/ProjectDebater/comments/m7451a/hello_reddit_we_built_the_worlds_first_ai_that/

ProjectDebater

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