AI Argues For and Against Itself in Oxford Union Debate

 In brief:

 The Oxford Union added an AI engine to its list of distinguished speakers. The AI ​​argued that the only way to stop such tech from becoming too powerful is to have "no AI at all". But it also argued the best option could be to embed it "into our brains as a conscious AI." The experiment was designed to ignite conversation on the ethics of the technology. The Megatron LLB Transformer, used for the debate, was developed by the Applied Deep Research team at computer chip firm Nvidia and based on earlier work by Google. It was given access to a huge range of data - including the whole of Wikipedia, 63 million English news articles from 2016 to 2019, and 38 gigabytes worth of Reddit chat. The project was devised by post-graduate students studying Artificial Intelligence for Business at Oxford's Said Business School, which hosted the debate.

Why this is important: 

The AI ​​was asked to both defend and argue against the motion: "This house believes that AI will never be ethical." Having an actual AI take part in the debate may be, to some extent, a publicity stunt, but it was able to highlight AI's abilities in a way that human debate never could. In turn, this draws attention to the ethical nature of AI.