IBM’s Project Debater engaged in a live debate with human debate champions. The debate was carried out at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and debaters were arguing about preschool subsidies.
The debaters, Harish Natarajan – European Champion and IBM’s Project Debater were informed of the debate topic 15 minutes in advance. Each debater had a total of eight minutes to share an opening argument, a rebuttal, and a two-minute closing argument. Project Debater was arguing in favor of the preschool subsidies whereas Natarajan against it.
In the end, Project Debater lost the debate against European Debate Champion Natarajan. Before the debate, 79 percent of the audience agreed that preschool should be subsidized and 13 percent disagreed. By the end, 62 percent of the crowd agreed and 30 percent disagreed.
IBM’s AI debater showed that it is able to extract relevant, useful and various information on the topic. Moreover, it showed that it can cite a broad range of sources making its arguments much stronger.
Project Debater is the first AI system that can debate humans on complex topics. IBM’s AI-based Debater is able to digest massive texts, construct a well-structured speech on a given topic and deliver it with clarity and purpose. It is trained by billions of sentences from newspaper articles, Wikipedia topic pages, and other sources of knowledge.
According to IBM, the goal of Project Debater is to build a system that helps people make evidence-based decisions when the answers aren’t black-and-white. All things considered, this was a successful test for Project Debater.