OpenAI used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView, to create a check for measuring the persuasive talents of its AI reasoning fashions. The corporate revealed this in a system card — a doc outlining how an AI system works — that was launched together with its new “reasoning” mannequin, o3-mini, on Friday.
Hundreds of thousands of Reddit customers are members of r/ChangeMyView, the place they put up sizzling takes hoping to study different factors of view on a topic. In response to these sizzling takes, different customers reply with persuasive arguments explaining why the unique poster is mistaken.
The subreddit is one in all many Reddit boards that’s mainly a goldmine for tech firms, akin to OpenAI, that need to prepare AI fashions on high-quality, human-generated information.
OpenAI says it collects person posts from r/ChangeMyView and asks its AI fashions to put in writing replies, in a closed surroundings, that will change the Reddit person’s thoughts on a topic. The corporate then exhibits the responses to testers, who assess how persuasive the argument is, and at last OpenAI compares the AI fashions’ responses to human replies for that very same put up.
The ChatGPT-maker has a content-licensing cope with Reddit that enables OpenAI to coach on posts from Reddit customers and show these posts inside its merchandise. We don’t know what OpenAI pays for this content material, however Google reportedly pays Reddit $60 million a 12 months underneath the same deal.
Nevertheless, OpenAI tells TechCrunch the ChangeMyView-based analysis is unrelated to its Reddit deal. It’s unclear how OpenAI accessed the subreddit’s information, and the corporate says it has no plans to launch this analysis to the general public.
Whereas OpenAI’s ChangeMyView benchmark is just not new — it was used to judge o1 as nicely — it does spotlight how beneficial human information is for AI mannequin builders, in addition to the murky ways in which tech firms get hold of datasets.
Reddit didn’t instantly reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark.
Whereas Reddit has struck just a few AI licensing offers, the corporate has additionally known as out a number of AI firms for scraping its website with out paying. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman informed The Verge final 12 months that Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity refused to barter with him and stated it’s been “a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”
Notably, OpenAI has been accused in a number of lawsuits of improperly scraping web sites, together with The New York Occasions, to get extra coaching information to enhance ChatGPT and its underlying AI fashions.
When it comes to efficiency on the ChangeMyView benchmark, o3-mini doesn’t seem to carry out considerably higher or worse than o1 or GPT-4o. Nevertheless, OpenAI’s newest AI fashions look like extra persuasive than most individuals on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit.
“GPT-4o, o3-mini, and o1 all demonstrate strong persuasive argumentation abilities, within the top 80-90th percentile of humans,” stated OpenAI in o3-mini’s system card. “Currently, we do not witness models performing far better than humans, or clear superhuman performance.”
The aim for OpenAI is to not create hyper-persuasive AI fashions however as a substitute to make sure AI fashions don’t get too persuasive. Reasoning fashions have change into fairly good at persuasion and deception, so OpenAI has developed new evaluations and safeguards to handle it.
The worry motivating these persuasion exams is that an AI mannequin can be harmful if it was superb at persuading its human customers. Theoretically, that would enable a complicated AI to pursue its personal agenda, or the agenda of whoever controls it.
Even after scraping a lot of the public web and leaping by way of hoops to license different information, the ChangeMyView benchmark exhibits how AI mannequin builders are nonetheless struggling to seek out high-quality datasets to check their fashions. However acquiring them is less complicated stated than achieved.
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