Champion
debater Harish Natarajan argues against IBM Debater, represented by a screen
with a blue oval, in a competition at the IBM Think conference. Stephen Shankland/CNET
The subject under debate was
whether the government should subsidize preschools. But the real question was
whether a machine called IBM Debater could out-argue a top-ranked human
debater.
The answer, on Monday night, was
no.
Watch
this:Hear IBM
Debater argue with a human -- and lose 3:18
Harish Natarajan, the grand finalist at the 2016 World Debating
Championships, swayed more among an audience of hundreds toward his point of
view than the AI-powered IBM Debater did toward its. Humans, at least
those equipped with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities, can still
prevail when it comes to the subtleties of knowledge, persuasion and argument.
"What really struck me is the potential value of IBM Debater
when [combined] with a human being," Natarajan said after the debate.
IBM's AI was able to dig through mountains of information and offer useful
context for that knowledge, he said.
It was the second time IBM Debater took on humans in public,
though it's taken part in dozens of debates behind Big Blue's walls. In the
first IBM Debater competition, the
AI defeated one human debater soundly while losing a closer competition with
another. This time, though, the human opponent was tougher -- indeed, IBM
researchers involved in the years-long project expected their AI would lose.
Computer
persuasion
IBM Debater lost, but there's no question it won in a way:
Listening to it, you evaluate what it's saying, not just that it's a computer
saying something. The machine marshaled its argument, broke that down into a
few points and backed them up with data from various studies. It wasn't
perfect, but it was on point.
And, weirdly for an AI, it told us how Homo sapiens ought to
behave.
"Giving opportunities to the less fortunate should be a moral
obligation for any human being," IBM Debater said.
In
the debate, each side had 15 minutes to prepare -- though only IBM Debater has
the advantage of being able to draw upon 10 billion sentences' worth of
publications from news articles and academic research. Each side took turns
making its case, rebutting the other and then presenting a closing argument.
The debate is scored based on how many people change their minds.
Before the debate, 79 percent agreed with the position in favor of preschool
subsidies, the stance IBM Debater argued for. But afterward, the audience
support dropped to 62 percent.
In an age in which Apple'sSiri, Amazon's Alexa and the Google Assistant listen to
our questions and answer in human-sounding voices, it's easy to forget how
remarkable it is that we can converse with computers. IBM Debater goes a step
beyond, speaking for minutes.
"She was surprisingly charming and human-sounding," said
John Donvan, host of the debate moderator of Intelligence Squared Debates, which runs debates and
broadcasts them through a radio show.
Watch
this:IBM's new
AI can debate you 2:00
Don't expect to run something like Project Debater on your laptop
anytime soon. It ran mainly on a powerful server with 28 processing cores and a
whopping 768GB of memory -- roughly 50 times that of a high-end laptop. It was
supported by a quartet of servers, each with 64GB of memory and 2-terabyte hard
drives packed with text.
Preschool
subsidies
IBM Debater argued in favor of the view that we should subsidize
preschools, and Natarajan argued against it.
In Debater's view, preschools "carry benefits for society as
a whole. It is our duty to support them." Good preschools mean kids --
especially poor kids -- do better in life.
Natarajan countered that preschool subsidies are "little more
than a politically motivated giveaway to members of the middle class ... and
not to the individuals who are most underprivileged." He also poked holes
in Debater's assumptions, for example that a subsidy will meaningfully improve
education for the poor.
Debater showed improvements over its 2018 debate. One new trick up
its sleeve was the ability to offer a parallel argument -- in this case that
subsidizing health care can be beneficial. Another was improved rebuttal
skills. After Natarajan argued that some kids might not benefit from immersion
into the potentially competitive world of preschool at age 3 or 4, IBM grasped
that view and took issue with it: "My opponent argued that preschools are
harmful," it said.
"We were working very hard since June to improve the
system," said Noam Slonim, the Project Debater principal investigator at
IBM Research. Debater's source material -- academic publications and news
articles -- also have been expanded with another year's worth of data to the
end of 2018.
Most
challenging contest so far
The competition was the most challenging yet for IBM's AI.
Natarajan "is at a different level compared to the debaters
we faced so far," said Ranit Aharonov, IBM's manager of Project Debater.
"He's the most decorated debater in the history of university debate
competitions with the world record in the number of victories."
The event, at IBM's Think conference in San Francisco, is IBM
Debater's last big debate. "Debater is nice, and it's good to showcase,
but we should be focusing on how to take that technology and make something
that's commercially viable," Aharonov said. "We are at the stage where
we'll finalize the first use case we'll work on."
That could be something like helping a company understand the
views of its employees or customers, or helping the news media or governments
engage people in discussion about contested issues, she said.
That's because the technology behind Project Debater is all about
the messiness and nuance of the real world we humans live in, not the
black-and-white realm of games.
"We are going out of the comfort zone of AI into territory
which is more gray," Slonim said.
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