Can AI beat a human in a debate?

On Monday, Harish Natarajan, a grand finalist in 2016’s World Debating Championships, faced off against IBM’s Project Debater — a computer touted by the company as the first artificial-intelligence system built to meaningfully debate humans. Natarajan won, but the computer demonstrated the increasingly complex arguments that AI is starting to make.

Project Debater, which has been in the works since 2012, is designed to come up with coherent, convincing speeches of its own, while taking in the arguments of a human opponent and creating its own rebuttal. It even formulates its own closing argument. To generate its arguments and rebuttals, Project Debater uses newspaper and magazine articles from its own database, and also takes in the nuances of the human opponent’s arguments. It is not connected to the internet and cannot crib arguments from sites like Wikipedia.