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New IBM Robot Holds Its Own In a Debate With a Human (nbcnews.com)
PolygamousRanchKid shares a report: The human brain may be the ultimate super computer, but artificial intelligence is catching up so fast, it can now hold a substantive debate with a human, according to audience feedback. IBM's Project Debater made its public debut in San Francisco Monday afternoon, where it squared off against Noa Ovadia, the 2016 Israeli debate champion and in a second debate, Dan Zafrir, a nationally renowned debater in Israel. The AI is the latest grand challenge from IBM, which previously created Deep Blue, technology that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov and Watson, which bested humans on the game show Jeopardy.
In its first public outing, Project Debater turned out to be a formidable opponent, scanning the hundreds of millions of newspaper and journal articles in its memory to quickly synthesize an argument on a topic and position it was assigned on the spot. "Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans," said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research. An audience survey taken before and after each debate found that Project Debater better enriched the audience's knowledge as it argued in favor of subsidies for space exploration and in favor of telemedicine, but that the human debaters did a better job delivering their speeches.
The AI isn't trained on topics -- it's trained on the art of debate. For the most part, Project Debater spoke in natural language, choosing the same words and sentence structures as a native English speaker. It even dropped the odd joke, but with the expected robotic delivery. IBM's engineers know the AI isn't perfect. Just like humans, it makes mistakes and at times, repeats itself. However, the company believes it could have a broad impact in the future as people now have to be more skeptical as they sort out fact and fiction. "Project Debater must adapt to human rationale and propose lines of argument that people can follow," Krishna said in a blog post. "In debate, AI must learn to navigate our messy, unstructured human world as it is -- not by using a pre-defined set of rules, as in a board game."
In its first public outing, Project Debater turned out to be a formidable opponent, scanning the hundreds of millions of newspaper and journal articles in its memory to quickly synthesize an argument on a topic and position it was assigned on the spot. "Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans," said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research. An audience survey taken before and after each debate found that Project Debater better enriched the audience's knowledge as it argued in favor of subsidies for space exploration and in favor of telemedicine, but that the human debaters did a better job delivering their speeches.
The AI isn't trained on topics -- it's trained on the art of debate. For the most part, Project Debater spoke in natural language, choosing the same words and sentence structures as a native English speaker. It even dropped the odd joke, but with the expected robotic delivery. IBM's engineers know the AI isn't perfect. Just like humans, it makes mistakes and at times, repeats itself. However, the company believes it could have a broad impact in the future as people now have to be more skeptical as they sort out fact and fiction. "Project Debater must adapt to human rationale and propose lines of argument that people can follow," Krishna said in a blog post. "In debate, AI must learn to navigate our messy, unstructured human world as it is -- not by using a pre-defined set of rules, as in a board game."
Completely fake. The topics were prearranged, and yes they were "assigned on the spot" but there was a predetermined list. IBM is desperately trying to sell their AI snakeoil. If AI worked, why not have it solve REAL problems that people will pay for, rather than parlor tricks like plying Go, and Chess and other games?
So, it scans human-generated content, and then builds a plausible sounding argument to support whatever position you give it.
This thing is going to cause a lot of unemployment in politics.
This is a cool project, but the article is utterly useless without a transcript.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There is no "AI" on this planet and this thing is just a collection of dumb reflexes that give the appearance of an intelligent agent.
And so are you.
Of course, you can argue otherwise, but then the AI can make such an argument as well, and will likely do a better job at it (according to the article).
So how should I determine which stream of electronic communication was generated by "an intelligent agent" and which one by "a collection of dumb reflexes"?
The most logical conclusion is that there's not much of a difference.
In its first public outing, Project Debater turned out to be a formidable opponent, scanning the hundreds of millions of newspaper and journal articles in its memory to quickly synthesize an argument on a topic and position it was assigned on the spot. "Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans," said Arvind Krishna
If the data it uses to "argue" comes from human sources, it has a human bias.
That being said, it is cool technology and it demonstrates how bad human debate can be. If you can win an argument without actually knowing what you are talking about (which you can), it demonstrates the (lack of) value debate can have; it also underscores the lack of real value in the level of political discourse that we have today. We spend a lot of time arguing over things we don't really know about.
Let me know when the computer can win a Slashdot debate. There's no way it could cope with this sort of argument:
Computer: "AI has made great improvements in it's cognitive ability."
Anonymous Coward: "Yeah, WELL FUCK YOU!!!!"
AC wins every time.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Not a rhetorical question. Like all the pseudo-intelligent software being trotted out the last several years, it does not know how to 'think'. Try asking it "What are you doing right now, and why are you doing it?" and let's see what it says. All this software is doing is sifting and sorting information, and arranging it into statements, and it doesn't matter if the statements it's making are in response to statements made by the human debater, the machine does not understand what it's doing, just like it doesn't understand anything at all; there's no mind in there, it doesn't 'think', it just processes information, and it's not relevant so far as I'm concerned that it happens to do that in a sophisticated and remarkable way. Not impressed, it's just another dog-and-pony-show to placate investors and stockholders.
Not knowledge, however this thing can process vast amounts of knowledge and provide a response which has a very high probability of being correct and/or at the very least relevant, and it can do this in real-time.
If users could follow directions regarding computers, or even have a two-way conversation with this machine, then this thing could take over a third of my duties in I.T. (Handholding, and transliterating). As it stands the machine may reduce my time to research answers, a problem which Google has largely solved.
I suppose this could provide a high level of research to those who need to learn how to research, making them ineffective at their jobs without technology, and unable to accurately access the quality of the technology leading to stagnation and the collapse of modern society.
Deploying this thing in a field of debate shows an effective alternative to reducing the value of intelligence. If we were to capitalize on this for educational and testing purposes, somehow outlawing and blocking its use in commercial environments, it could prove an incredible asset for building a brighter future. We could potentially use this machine to sharpen our brains rather than to dull them.
It is a sad state that we equate Debate skills with leadership skills.
Debates are something you need to win or loose. Not an open discussion to grow and learn. You can win a debate on a false idea or lie over someone who has the truth and data on their side, however they may lack the debate skills to try to convince a neutral party. Often the best and well thoughout idea is far more complex then what can be stated in quick sound blurbs.
Presidential debates over the past few generations have not been really productive. Most of us are already had made up their mind on who they are voting for, most will just vote for whoever has a R or D on their party affiliation regardless of their stance. So the Debators neutral party is just a tiny fraction of the population. And for the most part they are trying to read non-verbal queues. (such as Nixon sweating) or finding someone just loosing their temper. The topic up for debate are not relevant as we have a good idea where the stance is.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Guys, this is really silly. As Godel has already demonstrated, it is impossible for a machine to meet the criteria of consciousness. "Artificial intelligence" is a chimerical idea and is not possible.
"Imitative intelligence" would be more accurate. A machine may be able to hold a facade of "intelligence," but any semblance of intelligence has been derived from its creators.
The claim that the machine "synthesized an argument" is misleading. Machines are not capable of a priori. The machine simply sorted information giving the appearance of a synthesized argument. The author projected this activity of synthesizing an argument onto the machine, but that is not what happened.
Then the author of the article made the incredible claim that the machine does not have bias, but just the same, they fed it a junk-food diet of newspaper articles & mental garbage.
This article is propaganda.
They're trying to persuade you to believe that machines can be intelligent, that machines will soon be just as or more capable than men at thinking, and that human mental faculties are mechanical. Perhaps the hope is that the general populace will eventually fall under of a large "appeal to authority, or argumentum ad verecundiam" umbrella and give up critical thinking altogether. This is already happening to people in STEM, who have largely ignored philosophy, and evidently cannot think rightly.