AI is here to debate humans – now what?

You may have already heard the news: IBM developed an artificial intelligence program that can form logical, persuasive arguments. You can see the program in action in the video below.

The tech has been in development for a few years. Last year, IBM took it out to debate with real humans, and again, rolled it out for this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

The show was an opportunity to showcase a new feature called Speech by Crowd, which IBM describes as a cloud-based AI platform used for crowd-sourcing decision support. (Huh?) What that actually means is that the technology aims to understand how people feel about a specific decision — like a proposed policy or a reaction to a speech.

Where this will most likely be applied is in the ever-expanding realm of customer experience — potentially allowing brands to gather richer feedback like customer satisfaction.

Project Debater is a big step toward understanding language

Project Debater’s arguments feel a little cold and formulaic. If you watch any of the videos, you’ll see the calculated, robotic logic at play. What were you expecting?

Here’s a video that goes into great detail as to how the bot works:

We’re one big step closer to robot-human understanding, making this technology a huge milestone.

The Project Debater bot is powered by a mashup of multiple AI principles and algorithms. To start the debate, the robot is given a topic. It scans a database of articles and academic research, sorts through that information to find pieces of text that are both relevant and take on an argumentative tone.

Another algorithm looks for duplicate snippets and eliminates them from its collection of verbal ammunition.

During the debate, a voice recognition system listens to the opponent’s argument — and generates relevant counterpoints.

Where does a debating robot fit into real-world applications?

A debating robot may not change our day-to-day lives. It’s unlikely that struggling high school debate teams can sneak the bot dressed in jeans and a T-shirt into a competition for a little help.

Project Debater’s greatest strengths are extracting facts from huge amounts of text. It could be useful in classroom settings, or as a way to address the fake news problems we’ve seen on Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp.

That said, IBM has not made it clear how the bot determines what information is factual and what is biased.

The way that the robot currently expresses arguments still feels a bit, well, robotic. Noam Slonim, the principal investigator for the project, says scientific research will be the most immediate application.

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What’s next for Project Debater?

Some people are worried that Project Debater represents the next step toward the robot apocalypse. We’re not so sure that IBM is the equivalent of Skynet, but time will tell. What’s so neat about IBM’s latest publicity stunt is that it shows advancement in understanding human sentiment.

Yet, IBM still hasn’t figured out the algorithm that powers feelings. Yes, the robot nails the formula the debate — but that lack of passion or emotion means we’re not replaceable yet. Heck, the debating bot even lost its last match on preschool subsidies just a few weeks back.

It’s exciting to see “Miss Debater” offer up her fact-based arguments. If IBM’s version of the truth matches up with basic journalistic ethics, this could be a really amazing asset — a logical counterpoint to our human emotions.