Inspiration
Debating is an essential skill that helps one make better decisions by considering pros and cons. Debate clubs help students become better negotiators as they learn the art of persuasion. Debate clubs are not available to everyone. Even where available, it may be time prohibitive
What it does
- Dr. Debate helps brainstorm pros and cons against AI, crystalize arguments and develop them into effective debating strategy that anticipates possible comebacks and counter arguments.
- Dr. Debate helps a debater practice against AI at a convenient time and as often as needed.
- Dr. Debate can be used to learn and understand the strategic thinking and persuasive arguments that went into classical historical debates.
How we built it
- At its core is Open AI ChatGPT APIs
- Developed a web application wrapper that sets up the GPT with system prompts with debate context and enables the back-and-forth interaction necessary for a debate.
Challenges we ran into
- Crafting the system prompt was key to make a ChatGPT good debate partner.
- Communicating user's area of interest in a historical debate was required to keep the GPT from summarizing the entire debate and instead focus on the technique used in a particular section.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This is a strong debate tool that that has wide application and can be hosted online (e.g., AWS) to become available to the general public.
What we learned
- ChatGPT can be a strong debater, but it has to be kept from summarization and being too wordy.
- A simple clean UI improves user experience tremendously.
What's next for Dr. Debate
- Port this to AWS or Azure to make it a commercial service, where users can sign up for an account, have access to the debate agent.
- Within a user's account, the system can keep track of their past debates and progression of debate skills.
- Make this available to debate clubs at all high schools.
- Voice integration would make debating more natural.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.