IBM lets AI debate against human (video)

IBM recently showed off Project Debater, the first AI agent capable of debating humans on complex topics. Big Blue worked six years on this AI system, with the goal of illustrating that Project Debater can process large datasets and present it in coherent, spoken arguments.

It's still far from perfect though. Even though Project Debater is trained in a hundred topics, the IBM researcher who helped oversee the project says the AI can have a "meaningful" debate just 40 percent of the time:

Noam Slonim, an IBM researcher who helped oversee the project, estimated that the technology could have a “meaningful” debate on those 100 topics 40 percent of the time. IBM chose the topic for the live debate before it began. In some cases, the machine’s lengthy speeches hinted at how it was stitching together its arguments — identifying relevant sentences and clauses and then combining them into a reasonably coherent, computerized thought.

Reporters present at the demonstration write Project Debater was an interesting display of AI technology, but far from perfect. The system was capable of presenting an impressive amount of persuasive information, but did so with quite a lot of stumbling blocks, and sometimes choppy delivery.