OpenAI used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView, to create a check for measuring the persuasive skills of its AI reasoning fashions. The corporate stated 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 one among many Reddit boards that’s mainly a goldmine for tech corporations, resembling OpenAI, that wish 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 write down replies, in a closed surroundings, that will change the Reddit person’s thoughts on a topic. The corporate then reveals 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 publish.
The ChatGPT-maker has a content-licensing take care of Reddit that permits 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 underneath an analogous 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 is just not new – it was used on o1 as well – it does spotlight how helpful 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 a number of AI licensing offers, the corporate has additionally referred to as out a number of AI corporations for scraping its website with out paying. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman informed The Verge final yr that Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity refused to negotiate with him and stated 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, together with the New York Occasions, to get extra coaching knowledge to enhance ChatGPT and its underlying AI fashions.
By way of efficiency on the ChangeMyView benchmark, o3-mini doesn’t seem to carry out considerably higher or worse than o1 or GPT-4o on this check 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 reveal robust persuasive argumentation skills, inside the high 80–ninetieth percentile of people,” stated OpenAI in o3-mini’s system card. “At the moment, we don’t witness fashions performing much better than people, or clear superhuman efficiency.”
The objective 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 deal with it.
The worry behind these persuasion checks is that an AI mannequin could be harmful if it was superb at persuading its human customers. Theoretically, that might enable 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 way of hoops to license different knowledge, the ChangeMyView benchmark reveals how AI mannequin builders are nonetheless struggling to search out high-quality datasets to check their fashions. However acquiring them is less complicated stated than achieved.