OpenAI Used This Subreddit to Assess the Persuasiveness of Its Artificial Intelligence.

OpenAI has utilized the subreddit r/ChangeMyView to develop a test that evaluates the persuasive capabilities of its artificial reasoning models. This initiative was shared in a "system card," a document that describes how an artificial intelligence system operates, released alongside its new reasoning model, o3-mini, recently.

The subreddit has millions of users who participate in discussions where they post opinions with the intention of understanding different viewpoints on various topics. Users respond to these opinions with persuasive arguments aimed at convincing the original author. For OpenAI, this subreddit has become a valuable source of human-generated data, allowing for the training of its artificial intelligence models with high-quality information.

The company collects posts from r/ChangeMyView and asks its AI models to generate responses aimed at changing the user's opinion in that post. These responses are evaluated by a group of testers who judge their persuasiveness, and subsequently, OpenAI compares the responses of its models with those of humans in the same thread. The company has established a content licensing agreement with Reddit, allowing it to train its models using posts from the platform and display them in its products. However, it is suggested that the evaluation based on ChangeMyView is not related to this Reddit agreement, and no details have been revealed about how OpenAI accessed the data from the subreddit.

Although the use of the ChangeMyView benchmark is not new—having already been used to evaluate the o1 model—it underscores the importance of human data in the development of AI models and the unclear methods that some tech companies sometimes employ to obtain datasets. Reddit has faced issues with several AI companies that have scraped information from its website without compensation, according to its CEO, Steve Huffman.

In terms of performance on the ChangeMyView benchmark, the o3-mini model has not demonstrated notably superior or inferior performance compared to the o1 or GPT-4o models. However, OpenAI's new models appear to be more persuasive than most users in the subreddit. OpenAI emphasizes that its models exhibit strong skills in persuasive argumentation, ranking in the 80-90 percentile of humans, although there is no significantly superior performance compared to humans.

OpenAI's goal is not to create extremely persuasive AI models but to prevent them from being overly convincing. As reasoning models become increasingly effective at persuasion and deception, the company has implemented new assessments and safeguards. The concern behind these tests is that a highly persuasive AI could be dangerous if it managed to manipulate its users, allowing it to pursue its own agenda or that of its controllers. Despite having gathered a significant portion of the public internet and facing challenges in licensing other data, the ChangeMyView benchmark illustrates that AI model developers still encounter obstacles in obtaining high-quality datasets.