A Machine Learning computer debates humans, and wins...Now it's learning the art of persuasion.
An IBM
computer debates humans, and wins, in a new, nuanced competition
AI isn't just winning
at board games. Now it's learning the art of persuasion.
BY STEPHEN SHANKLAND JUNE 18, 2018 7:03 PM
PDT
We saw computers beat humans at chess in 1997, beat humans at Jeopardy in 2011 and vanquish the world's best human players of the ancient game of Go in
2017. On Monday, a computer edged out a victory over people in a far more
nuanced competition: debate.
IBM created
a system called Project Debater that competes in what the company calls
computational argumentation -- knowing a subject, presenting a position and
defending it against opposition. At a press event, IBM pitted the system
against two humans with a track record of winning debates.
In one debate, Noa Ovadia
overall nudged two people among a few dozen in a human audience toward her
perspective that governments shouldn't subsidize space exploration. But in the
second, Project Debater soundly defeated Dan Zafrir, pulling nine audience
members toward its stance that we should increase the use of telemedicine.
You're not going to lose your
job yet to Project Debater's commercial spin-off right away as Big Blue tries
to profit from the IBM Research project. Project Debater betrayed its inhuman
nature several times over the course of its 20 minutes of off-the-cuff speech.
But Debater did demonstrate that artificial
intelligence can handle some complexities of human interaction,
not just the clear-cut rules and victories of a board game or game show.
"Our life is not black
or white. It's ambiguous, it's subjective," said Ranit Aharonov, director
of Project Debater. "AI will have to navigate in that territory."
Project
Debater was trained in advance on debating methods, but not the details of the
debate itself, which it found out about only moments before the debate started.
To formulate its argument, it had at its disposal a collection of 300 million
news articles and scholarly papers, previously indexed for quick search
results. But it had to find the information, package it persuasively, listen to
its opponents' arguments and formulate a rebuttal.
"It's amazing to see
this technology pull from 300 million sources and distill it into what sounds
like a conversational narrative in debate," said Clea Conner Chang, chief
operating officer of Intelligence
Squared Debates, an organization that runs its own debates with a
similar argue-and-respond style.
Echoes
of 2001: A Space Odyssey
Project Debater's brain is a
group of computers in a distant data center, but IBM chose to represent it as a
black pillar on the stage. Sci-fi fans might have been reminded of the alien
obelisk in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the
book and movie that also made famous HAL 9000, a well-spoken but malevolent AI.
Debater paid homage to the author, too, at one point quoting his famous maxim,
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic."
Although IBM didn't try to
pretend Debater is human, it speaks in a well-modulated female voice, and
researchers call it "she." At the top of the pillar was a display
showing its state of mind with curvaceous shapes in a soothing blue.
Three circles swapped places
when Project Debater was thinking. They merged into an oval with a waving
sinusoidal line when the machine was speaking. And when it was listening to its
human opponent, the three circles hopped up and down like the animations you
see when your computer is waiting for a software update to install.
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Debater showed a grasp of
debating's nuts and bolts. It marshaled evidence, told you its stance,
explained how its argument would proceed and made its case. It quoted
authorities, like German ministers touting the economic benefits of space
exploration or scientific studies showing better health outcomes for diabetes
patients monitored from afar.
Plenty of its words were
lifted directly from its corpora of data, IBM said. But it does construct its
own sentences, too, as when presenting its summary of the arguments it plans to
make. And it does plenty of other language work, too -- assessing arguments,
deciding which points to raise specifically or broadly, and evaluating the
counterarguments made by its opponent.
Project Debater, run out of
IBM's labs in Haifa, Israel, began in 2011 when IBM was looking for the next
challenge after its Jeopardy victory. Researcher Noam Slonim suggested a human
versus computer debate, and Aya Soffer, who runs IBM Research's global AI team,
liked it as well. It was one among 30 projects IBM evaluated, she said.
"From our perspective,
the debate format is the means and not the end. It's a way to push the
technology forward and part of our bigger strategy of mastering language,"
Soffer said. "In general, computers are lagging significantly in
understanding and being able to express themselves. If we expect AI to be
useful, being able to communicate with people is critical."
Comic relief
It throws in jokes, too --
human-written jokes, but the machine has to master the timing.
"I can't say it makes my
blood boil, because I have no blood, but it seems some people naturally suspect
technology because it's new," Debater said in its closing argument in
favor of telemedicine.
And arguing for space
exploration subsidies, Debater said it supports technology, "being as I am
a prime example of its power." The audience chuckled, though an audience
outside IBM's Watson West offices in San Francisco might react differently to a
computer that can figure out the right moment to inject that comment into a
discussion.
There were gaffes, like the
moment Debater said subsidizing space exploration "is more important than
good roads, improved schools or better health care." That statement would
torpedo most would-be politicians' chances at election.
Debate
'defines what it is to be human'
But Chris Reed, a professor
at the University of Dundee, said we shouldn't take the achievements for
granted. He was impressed that Debater successfully figured out what raw
material supported the argument it was making and that it got verb tenses
correct and mastered other basics that have tripped up computer debaters.
Debater even demonstrated
procatalepsis -- the ability to anticipate its opponents' arguments and
pre-emptively attack them, Reed said. He was clearly impressed.
"Argumentation is one of
the fundamental things that defines what it is to be human," Reed said.
"Argument and debate is the engine that drives the process of science,
that characterizes what happens in political fora, that frames our conception
of religion. if we can go any way toward building computer models that tackle
these issues, we're doing something really important."
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