I enjoy having debates. There’s a lot of fun to be had when two people structure an argument and present opposing points on a topic and it can feel like you’re exercising your brain.
By challenging ideas, it can help to refine your own thinking and, if your verbal sparring is competitive, there’s also a sense of satisfaction if you “win”.
So, it was with this in mind that I decided to test if ChatGPT would be a great counterpart and whether it could possess good reasoning based on strong evidence and research.
Would it pay attention to my points and be ready to counter? Could it pivot and stay cool under pressure – remaining clear, sharp and focused at all times? Would it be able to successfully persuade me that my argument was flawed? And how long could I keep up the pace without becoming bored?
Letting ChatGPT decide
The first thing I needed to consider was a topic that I would be interested in debating. Should I go for something deep – perhaps debating whether humans are inherently selfish or altruistic – or topical (who should be responsible for climate change?).
Or should I just try something odd? I thought I’d give that a go and, rather than come up with my own topic, I decided to let ChatGPT throw up some options by asking it to give me a list of weird debates.
It gave me 15 choices and they included “do fish ever get thirsty?” which I felt wasn’t really open to debate and would actually have a scientific answer (lo and behold, our sister site, LiveScience has already addressed it).
There were some other interesting topics such as “is water wet, or does it just make things wet?” but that’s too deeply scientific for 30 minutes of fun and, quite aside from it being a lifelong debate, it goes down the path of having to define wet which can be a playful discussion in and of itself.
So I decided to go for “would zombies consider vampires dead or just extra dead” and off ChatGPT went, going in for the kill by serving up three perspectives broken down by bullet points. In that sense, it had just held a mini-debate with itself and the points felt a tad dry.
I considered how best to get ChatGPT to serve up a livelier debate with a bit more back-and-forth action.
Getting stuck in
Having thought, I entered: “Let’s have a debate: would zombies consider vampires undead or just ‘extra dead’?. You present an opening argument, taking one particular perspective, then I’ll give you my position and so on. Be lively, argumentative and display strong analytical and critical thinking skills. Listen to what I have to say and respond.”
And off ChatGPT went, providing a fleshier, meatier opening statement in which it considered zombies would consider vampires to be extra dead rather than undead. “Zombies embody death. Vampires manipulate it,” it said, asking if I was siding with the zombies or the vamps.
I replied: “Zombies are driven by instinct and a hunger for the living so they would sense that vampires share a similar defiance of natural death’. It then provided a very quick, yet comprehensive reply doubling down on its argument. In fact, it gave me two responses because it was using a new version of ChatGPT and it wanted to know which response I preferred.
Having pointed out that zombies don’t need to gobble down vampires to recognize they are undead, we started to get stuck into our respective points. I asked ChatGPT to make its responses more succinct because it’s rebuttals were becoming novel-esque and it obliged, making the debate even snappier. It began to feel more like a real two-way conversation.
Within reason
I thought I’d see if ChatGPT would be sparkier if I got it to spend a bit more time thinking, so I clicked the Reason button and the responses became a tad more logical. It asked me more targeted questions as opposed to just finishing off with “What do you say to that?” which helped with my thought process and argument.
In the end, we kind of agreed to disagree but the experience was enjoyable and it’s one I’d repeat. We did go round in circles a bit and some of the points were merely reinforcements of the one’s made earlier and yet it gave me perspectives I hadn’t considered before.
Of course, given it’s AI and you’re staring at a screen rather than a person’s face, there was no emotion attached – you couldn’t see the pain on the opposing face as they strained to come up with a counterpoint and nor were there any interjections – a strong strategic tool.
Still, if you have half-an-hour to spare and fancy getting involved in a polite argy-bargy, there’s no doubt this is a great use of ChatGPT. Or a complete waste of time. No, definitely, great. Right… debate.