Are You the Asshole? New AI Mimics Infamous Advice Subreddit

Two artists are illustrating bias in machine learning with data from one of the most opinionated sites on the internet: the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit. Motherboard reports: Now boasting 3.9 million users, the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit has become known as one of the leading forums where users can seek and share advice with virtual strangers. Internet artists Morry Kolman and Alex Petros trained three AI models using comments from over 60,000 posts from the popular subreddit. They filtered the comments according to the original subreddit's formal voting guidelines where users vote on whether the poster is the asshole or if ESH (Everyone Sucks Here). What results is a positive bot, a negative bot, and a neutral bot that respond to every scenario submitted. The project, funded by Digital Void, aims to illustrate how training data can bias the decision-making abilities of artificial intelligence models. Now, their bots can help you answer the age-old question: Are you the asshole? Users can submit their own moral dilemmas -- real or not -- and get a positive, negative, and swing response that can go either way. The three AI models are trained on data derived from Reddit users passing judgment so what results is a funny microcosm of what it's like to debate on the internet now. Any topic can inspire strong, contradictory reactions from total strangers. "When reading the results of a judgment, note the way in which the AI constructs ideas from snippets of human reasoning," their website reads. "Sometimes the AI can produce stunning results, but it is fundamentally attempting to mimic the ways that humans put together arguments."

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