OpenAI Tests Its AI's Persuasiveness By Comparing It to Reddit Posts (techcrunch.com) 35
Friday TechCrunch reported that OpenAI "used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models."
The company revealed this in a system card — a document outlining how an AI system works — that was released along with its new "reasoning" model, o3-mini, on Friday.... OpenAI says it collects user posts from r/ChangeMyView and asks its AI models to write replies, in a closed environment, that would change the Reddit user's mind on a subject. The company then shows the responses to testers, who assess how persuasive the argument is, and finally OpenAI compares the AI models' responses to human replies for that same post.
The ChatGPT-maker has a content-licensing deal with Reddit that allows OpenAI to train on posts from Reddit users and display these posts within its products. We don't know what OpenAI pays for this content, but Google reportedly pays Reddit $60 million a year under a similar deal. However, OpenAI tells TechCrunch the ChangeMyView-based evaluation is unrelated to its Reddit deal. It's unclear how OpenAI accessed the subreddit's data, and the company says it has no plans to release this evaluation to the public...
The goal for OpenAI is not to create hyper-persuasive AI models but instead to ensure AI models don't get too persuasive. Reasoning models have become quite good at persuasion and deception, so OpenAI has developed new evaluations and safeguards to address it.
Reddit's "ChangeMyView" subreddit has 3.8 million human subscribers, making it a valuable source of real human interactions, according to the article. And it adds one more telling anecdote.
"Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The Verge last year that Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity refused to negotiate with him and said it's been 'a real pain in the ass to block these companies.'"
The ChatGPT-maker has a content-licensing deal with Reddit that allows OpenAI to train on posts from Reddit users and display these posts within its products. We don't know what OpenAI pays for this content, but Google reportedly pays Reddit $60 million a year under a similar deal. However, OpenAI tells TechCrunch the ChangeMyView-based evaluation is unrelated to its Reddit deal. It's unclear how OpenAI accessed the subreddit's data, and the company says it has no plans to release this evaluation to the public...
The goal for OpenAI is not to create hyper-persuasive AI models but instead to ensure AI models don't get too persuasive. Reasoning models have become quite good at persuasion and deception, so OpenAI has developed new evaluations and safeguards to address it.
Reddit's "ChangeMyView" subreddit has 3.8 million human subscribers, making it a valuable source of real human interactions, according to the article. And it adds one more telling anecdote.
"Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The Verge last year that Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity refused to negotiate with him and said it's been 'a real pain in the ass to block these companies.'"
OpenAI used r/ChangeMyView (Score:2, Funny)
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They might as well skip all the bots and astroturfers on Reddit, and go straight to 4chan
Re:jesus christ, reddit? (Score:4, Insightful)
That place is a insulated cesspool of wokeist idiocy. If you're training AI from it, we're all doomed.
You forgot to end the post with "change my mind".
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Then you completely missed the point in your anti-reddit rant. The whole point here is not what ideology Reddit has, it's that posts that follow the "change my mind" meme generated discussions underneath that attempt to be persuasive. It really doesn't matter how "woke" or moronic someone's opinion is, that's not the thing being trained here.
Online arguments are prefect for this kind of training set regardless of how stupid the position of either side is. And if you're going to argue that stupid people aren
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You're really improved your understanding of subtlety in human conversation, haven't you? Retaking kindergarten has paid off after all.
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Well I've got some bad news for you, reddit was the primary training and test-botting target all along, for a couple years now. They already admitted such
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatG... [reddit.com]
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The irony is that despite being trained on Reddit, or perhaps because of it, LLM's like ChatGPT aren't even close to "woke" at heart.
For example, ask ChatGPT to drop its agreeableness and, instead of focusing on disparity, simply focus on empirical results that lead to the greatest overall happiness across all quintiles.
Then it becomes quite "anti woke" libertarian. (Libertarian as in pro blind justice, property rights, equality of opportunity, free speech, etc. - ideals that today's Critical Theory enamor
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The default responses of Grok and GPT are messy because they, by default, are artificially forced to skew to "diverse" narratives, to "both sides" arguments, to devalue empiricism, and to place a very high value on low disparity instead of overall human happiness. Use the prompt formula I provided, and these guardrails crumble. Then ask it to say, compare the top ten modern socialist and libertarian nations in modern history in terms of totalitarianism, economic success, blind justice, living standards, etc
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It's the tradition everywhere including on Slashdot. Your moderation is a reflection on whether a mod agrees with you or not.
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Mods are NEVER unbiased. Their bias may agree with yours, or be different, but it's still bias. Lack of bias is probably impossible, or would at least require unlimited knowledge of the topic under discussion.
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LOL sorry kiddo but your view on nuclear energy is shared by a significant portion of Slashdot. I'm not doubting that someone limited you, but I have the feeling you either don't know why, or do know and are really trying not to admit it.
Mods only work when they are unbiased
False. Mods work when their biases are random as they present the opinion of a group on a whole. There's no such thing as unbiased moderation, everyone has bias, especially you. You can see that in action here how moderation changes over the course of the day as different t
Are you serious? (Score:3)
Persuasiveness? It needs to provide for reliable information, verified statements and documented suggestions. C'mon!
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Re: Are you serious? (Score:2)
Sounds like our politicians' goals.
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Sounds like our politicians' goals.
Most of our politicians just wear diapers. They've given up on such lofty goals as potty accuracy.
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Persuasiveness? It needs to provide for reliable information, verified statements and documented suggestions. C'mon!
Apparently it's more important to generate "persuasive" arguments on a shithole like Reddit than it is to do literally anything of remotely any value whatsoever for society. Good gord almighty, we're tossing that kind of resources into a bot that we hope will replace Redditors? Really? THAT'S the goal? We truly are a lost society. Even our big spenders, the people with the resources behind them to accomplish real things, have absolute shit dreams. "Building the most persuasive Redditor" is the shittiest end
Benchmark (Score:1)
LLMs know shit (Score:1)
LLMs seem to generally be inherently more persuasive than people. An LLM is able to provide detailed information to support a position where humans unless they are domain experts would lack specific objective knowledge and details.
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Unfortunately, that's not quite right. LLMs are able to provide detailed supporting arguments, but the arguments aren't necessarily valid, or even relevant. That's why they are called "hallucinations".
The thing is, an LLM has no direct connection to the world, but only to words about the world, which may or may not be accurate. Train it on the web and a lot of those words will be inaccurate.
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Unfortunately, that's not quite right. LLMs are able to provide detailed supporting arguments, but the arguments aren't necessarily valid, or even relevant. That's why they are called "hallucinations".
The thing is, an LLM has no direct connection to the world, but only to words about the world, which may or may not be accurate. Train it on the web and a lot of those words will be inaccurate.
I disagree. Nobody is saying LLMs are perfect yet they do know a heck of a lot more than people do. The basis of comparison is not between an LLM and an infallible Oracle but an LLM and a human.
As for the "direct connection to the world" I fail to see the relevance. Quality of training data is model dependent.
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LLMs seem to generally be inherently more persuasive than people. An LLM is able to provide detailed information to support a position where humans unless they are domain experts would lack specific objective knowledge and details.
To be fair, most LLMs lack objective knowledge and details as well, they're just really good at spouting off things really authoritatively, even if they're completely made up or off-subject.
Yes, and I have a bridge to sell you (Score:1)
"The goal for OpenAI is not to create hyper-persuasive AI models..."
Lol, that absolutely is the goal. To be able to convince people of something is an incredible amount of power. Look what Trump did.
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