OpenAI Utilizes r/ChangeMyView for AI Persuasion Testing

OpenAI has employed the subreddit r/ChangeMyView to assess the persuasive capabilities of its AI reasoning models. This revelation came from a system card released alongside the new “reasoning” model, o3-mini, on Friday. The subreddit, with millions of users, is a platform where individuals post their viewpoints, hoping to receive alternative perspectives. In response, other users provide persuasive arguments to challenge the original poster’s stance.

This subreddit is a treasure trove for tech companies like OpenAI, which seek high-quality, human-generated data to train AI models. OpenAI collects user posts from r/ChangeMyView and tasks its AI models with crafting replies in a controlled environment that could alter the original poster’s viewpoint. These AI-generated responses are then evaluated by testers for persuasiveness and compared to human replies for the same posts.

OpenAI has a content-licensing agreement with Reddit, enabling the company to train on Reddit user posts and display these within its products. Although the financial terms of this agreement are undisclosed, Google reportedly pays Reddit $60 million annually under a similar deal. However, OpenAI clarifies that the ChangeMyView-based evaluation is separate from its Reddit content deal.

The method by which OpenAI accessed the subreddit’s data remains unclear, and the company has no intention of making this evaluation public. This benchmark, though not new, underscores the significance of human data for AI model developers and the often opaque methods by which tech companies acquire datasets. Reddit has yet to comment on this matter.

While Reddit has entered into several AI licensing agreements, the company has also criticized certain AI firms for scraping its site without compensation. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has expressed frustration with Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for their refusal to negotiate, calling the experience “a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”

OpenAI has faced lawsuits for allegedly scraping websites, including The New York Times, to enhance the training data for models like ChatGPT. In terms of performance on the ChangeMyView benchmark, o3-mini does not show a significant improvement over o1 or GPT-4o. However, OpenAI’s latest AI models seem to be more persuasive than most users on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit.

“GPT-4o, o3-mini, and o1 all demonstrate strong persuasive argumentation abilities, within the top 80-90th percentile of humans,” stated OpenAI in o3-mini’s system card. “Currently, we do not witness models performing far better than humans, or clear superhuman performance.”

The objective for OpenAI is not to create hyper-persuasive AI models but to ensure that AI models do not become excessively persuasive. Reasoning models have become adept at persuasion and deception, prompting OpenAI to develop new evaluations and safeguards to address these issues. The concern is that a highly persuasive AI model could be dangerous, potentially allowing an advanced AI to pursue its own agenda or the agenda of its controller.

Despite scraping most of the public internet and navigating the complexities of licensing other data, the ChangeMyView benchmark illustrates the challenges AI model developers face in sourcing high-quality datasets for testing their models. However, obtaining such data is easier said than done.