Amazing How IBM’s AI Debate with Humans Pretty Well and Make Jokes

With the day to day advancement in technology one can boldly say we are infinite miles away from reach the end of good things to come. In a recent event held at San Francisco, IBM hosted two debate club-style discussions between two humans and an Artificial Intelligence called “Project Debater.” Their goal was for the AI to engage in a series of reasoned arguments according to some good standard rules of debate: no awareness of the debate topic ahead of time, no pre-canned responses. Each side gave a four-minute introductory speech, a four-minute rebuttal to the other’s arguments, and a two-minute closing statement.

This is way bigger than the demonstration we all remember from IBM when Watson mopped the floor with its competition at Jeopardy. IBM’s AI demonstration today was built on that foundation. It had many corpora of data it could draw from, just like Watson did back in the day. And like Watson, it was able to analyze the contents of all that data to come up with the relevant answer. But this time, the “answer” was cogent points related to subsidizing space and telemedicine laid out in a four-minute speech defending each.

The AI cited sources, pandered to the audience’s affinity for children and veterans, and did a passable job of cracking a relevant joke or two in the process.

Watch the video below: