Artificial Intelligence or AI chatbots are one of the most discussed and hottest tech tools currently being developed. With Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon being frequent players in the area, it was Facebook’s turn to release news about its research on the matter.
Namely, the social media giant platform revealed results from its Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) through a series of open-source code. It also announced that its researchers have been teaching chatbots how to negotiate.
AI Chatbots can Now Compromise and Negotiate for the Best Offer, Even Lie for It
According to the report, the specialist used “supervised learning” in teaching a recurrent neural network how to “imitate” a person’s action. In doing so, they tried to make it guess what a person would say or do in that particular situation.
During the training process, the team had its AI chatbots divide a collection of objects including books and basketballs. Each item was correlated with a fixed point value, which the bots had to take into account.
Then, the AI’s goal was not only to divide the items but also negotiate via text and try to collect the most possible points. Also, the researchers programmed them so as to make it impossible for the bots to walk away empty handed, without having made a deal.
“Such dialogs [negotiations] contain both cooperative and adversarial elements, requiring agents to understand and formulate long-term plans and generate utterances to achieve their goals,” stated the team.
The bots were also tested in negotiations with actual human beings. In such cases, the chatbots seemed to accept deals less quickly.
According to the team, the bots, besides learning how to negotiate, also learned how to “lie”. Namely, they developed a strategy in which they initially feigned interest in an item with no value. But then they “compromised” by conceding it. As the team points out, this is a negotiating tactic frequently employed by people.
FAIR states that this behavior was not programmed, but came as a consequence of adapting to negotiating. Its best negotiators were seemingly on par with their human counterparts. Such AI chatbots made use of dialog rollouts and reinforcement learning to achieve their goal.
FAIR ads that this is a step forward in developing a “personalized digital assistant”. One that converse, reason, and also negotiate.
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