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Comment by Eridrus | Hacker News Reader

I think you made the same.mistake as the media - thinking that today's AI systems are more general than they truly are.

IBM did build a computer that could play jeapordy. But being able to play jeapordy doesn't tell us how good any of the subcomponents are at, e.g. understanding doctors notes/journal articles.

The same thing goes here, they built a system that can debate with some ability. Can it be used to spot fake news as a researcher says? Maybe some subcomponents could be reused for that, but there's no guarantee that they will be good enough for that task either.

You really have to take modern AI at face value and not extrapolate from what it actually does to anything else, otherwise you will whipsaw between optimism and cynicism.

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Actually, real debate is about responding to the other debaters arguments and countering them. Thus this IBM marketing show was not really a debate.

This was a demo that IBM could synthesize a plausible argument that supports or refutes a given assertion. That's interesting and a bit impressive (presuming its argument isn't simply a regurgitation of some position paper it found online). But without understanding cause and effect, its arguments will remain very superficial, probably driven by a small catalog of argument 'frames' (templates) that adaptively fill a handful of slots like [needs] [means] [goal] [conflicts] and [emotional hooks]. Using such simple recipes it can produce verbiage that plausibly sounds humanlike, but isn't actually reasoning. It's likely that the system couldn't even diagnose help desk problems using basic logic, e.g. backtracking to thise dependencies that might have caused the given outcome, thereby identifying only the possible and plausible causes.

What you write is true, but this mistake was deliberately spread through IBM's hype, such as seemingly empty promises to apply Watson to all sorts of business, medical, and political problems. This hype is the reason these demonstrations get as much attention as they do. This hype, which IBM uses to sell unrelated services, also seems to be the only thing IBM actually gets out of funding all of its AI development.

There was no accidental mistake by the media. It was a PR spin by IBM, hyping up the tech to sell the IBM brand.

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