OpenAI used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView, to create a take a look at for measuring the persuasive skills of its AI reasoning fashions. The corporate mentioned so 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.
Thousands and thousands of Reddit customers are members of r/ChangeMyView, the place they publish sizzling takes hoping to find out about 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 improper.
The subreddit is certainly one of many Reddit boards that’s mainly a goldmine for tech corporations, reminiscent of OpenAI, that need to prepare AI fashions on high-quality, human-generated knowledge.
OpenAI says it collects person posts from r/ChangeMyView and asks its AI fashions to put in writing replies, in a closed surroundings, that might 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 eventually OpenAI compares the AI fashions’ responses to human replies for that very same publish.
The ChatGPT-maker has a content-licensing deal 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 year beneath an identical deal.
Nonetheless, OpenAI tells TechCrunch this analysis is unrelated to that partnership. It’s unclear how OpenAI accessed this knowledge, and the corporate says it has no plans to launch this analysis to the general public.
Whereas OpenAI’s ChangeMyView benchmark will not be new – it was used on o1 as well – it does spotlight how beneficial human knowledge is for AI mannequin builders, in addition to the murky ways in which tech corporations receive 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 referred to as out a number of AI corporations for scraping its web site with out paying. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman advised The Verge final yr that Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity refused to negotiate with him and mentioned it’s been “an actual ache within the ass to dam these corporations.”
Notably, OpenAI has been accused in a number of lawsuits of improperly scraping web sites, including the New York Times, to get extra coaching knowledge 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 on this take a look at of persuasion. Nonetheless, OpenAI’s newest AI fashions appear to be extra persuasive than most individuals on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit.
“GPT-4o, o3-mini, and o1 all show robust persuasive argumentation skills, throughout the prime 80–ninetieth percentile of people,” mentioned OpenAI in o3-mini’s system card. “At present, we don’t witness fashions performing much better than people, or clear superhuman efficiency.”
The purpose 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 become quite good at persuasion and deception, so OpenAI has developed new evaluations and safeguards to deal with it.
The concern behind these persuasion assessments is that an AI mannequin could be harmful if it was excellent at persuading its human customers. Theoretically, that would permit a sophisticated AI to pursue its personal agenda, or the agenda of whoever controls it.
Even after scraping many of the public web and leaping by hoops to license different knowledge, the ChangeMyView benchmark exhibits how AI mannequin builders are nonetheless struggling to search out high-quality datasets to check their fashions. However acquiring them is less complicated mentioned than finished.
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