This AI Powered Bot Trained On Reddit Posts Will Tell You If You're The A-Hole
Artificial intelligence has been used to study climate change, improve healthcare, make more realistic and immersive gaming experiences, analyze daunting amounts of data from space exploration, and so much more. Oh, and apparently AI can also be useful in helping you figure out if you're the insensitive butthole in a particular situation. Ah, the wonders of science and technology, right?
Look, I already have a willing partner who will tell me if I'm being a jerk. But is she always correct? Probably not (but also maybe), and if I wanted some outside opinions on any given situation that stirred up an argument, I could turn to the r/youtheasshole subreddit where complete strangers (to me) would offer up their takes on the situation as I've described it to them.
Well, Morry Kolman and Alex Petros, the bright minds behind the Super Fungible Token (SFT) art project, designed an online tool inspired by the popular subreddit. It employs the power of three real AI models to analyze the situation as you present it, and then offers up responses similar to what you might receive on r/youtheasshole. At least in theory.
In practice? You probably shouldn't trust an AI bot to solve a dispute. Still, it's a fun tool and it's rooted in actual machine learning practices, to some extent.
"Are You The A-hole creates commenters from three AI text-generation models. These are custom text-generation systems trained on three different sets of data: one that has only ever read r/AmITheAsshole comments that call the poster the a-hole, one that only read comments absolving the poster, and one that was privy to a mix," the designers explain.
"These three models reflect the judgmental, understanding, and balanced 'users' you see in the comment section, and illustrate the wildly different lines of reasoning artificial intelligence can follow when trained on biased information," they add.
Creating this tool required a lot of reddit data, and it took some trial and error to figure out how best to scrape the subreddit. They ended up gathering around 100,000 posts from 2020 onward, plus the comments on each one. Then they used that data to train the AI bot.
You can give the AI bot a whirl in your browser—just type in the situation (up to 1,000 characters) and click the Submit button.
