Gradual Disempowerment from AI in Competitive Debating

Taking a cue from trumpets, competitive debate might be charitably taken as a pastime where you put in compressed air and childhood trauma comes out. Sally Rooney, author of Normal People (and one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2022), describes college debaters in an essay for the Dublin Review as “just students wearing ill-fitting formal clothes.” In the same essay, she also details how competitive debate, as a sport, is an environment where friendless teenagers are made successful and popular, how through her (quite successful) career as a college debater, she inhabited an intense drive for success, but also an underlying craving for social validation, institutional hierarchy. Later in this essay, she says: It’s hard to imagine my way back into that mindset now. I don’t think I will ever again want something so meaningless so much. I do think competitive debate gets a bit of a bad rap. It’s important to have an environment for young people that trains critical thinking as well as how to communicate persuasively. There’s evidence that participation in debate improves English language arts test scores in high schoolers. And, debaters do go on to do other things eventually. Ted Cruz, American senator, was the top-speaker in the 1992 US National Debating Championship. Dan Lahav, CEO of Irregular, was the top ranked speaker in the World Universities Debating Championships in 2018. Asher Spector, co-founder of Flapping Airplanes, was the North American champion in 2019. Evan Hubinger, lead of Alignment Stress-Testing at Anthropic, attended Tournament of Champions in 2014 and 2015. Tejal Patwardhan, who leads OpenAI’s frontier evals team, was a semifinalist in the World Universities Debating Championships in 2020. Competitive debate. Argumentatively, we really just want to use the above roll call to say: debate is one among many feeder institutions for frontier AI research and governance (among many prestigious careers). Debate also selects and perhaps develops ambitious, verbally capable people. And of course, it is related to how we think and reason about scalable oversight. So, the advent of AI hollowing out debate’s apprenticeship could have consequences beyond tournament culture, and this is a microculture of broader interest. I spent around eight years doing competitive debate throughout high school and university. And nowadays, I often find myself wondering about that meaninglessness — it felt a great deal at the time like it was the only thing that mattered. I did learn how to speak better, communicate and organize my ideas better, and it did give a shy, bookish boy many friends and positive life experiences. It was good to travel. And while we’re reminiscing, I would also put forward the question of if debaters in the current age of AI still get to have that experience? Or if, as in the case of Go, even that last luminous layer of wonder and ambition is being stripped away. To summarize some key claims of the afore-linked essay, I would basically put it as: Go AI became vastly better than humans at playing go. Some people cheated. While some of this was for self interest, it seems that many began consulting it out of convenience and curiosity. Cheaters continued to experience themselves as authors of their own play because they selected among its recommendations. Humans didn’t really improve from Go outside of memorizing AI moves, which is reflected in humans not doing better past move 60. So, let us spend some time to recount these gears in greater resolution in competitive debate, which is a much different activity. Debate is interactive, requiring delivery, adaptation, teamwork. Does the same vibe prevail? Competitive Debate Competitive debating at its core is a constraint optimisation game. You are given a set amount of prep time and a side you have to defend, regardless of what you actually believe about the matter. During this prep time, you are not allowed to Google or use online aid, and are only allowed to consult your partner or tournament officials for clarificatory and administrative matters. After this prep time, you plod into the room, sheafs of paper with hastily scrawled arguments in hand, and give speeches in alternating fashion in front of a judge. Then, after all the speeches are done and all debaters have exited the room, the judges confer amongst themselves, then call the debaters back in to announce the decision and its justification. Format of British Parliamentary Debate. Taken from here. There’s much to be said about the metagame here: debating is an activity judged by humans and while there are rules (such as how long speeches should be, or what burdens are fair to impose on a team), these rules are quite underspecified. An excellent and eloquent judge could, in a close room, give a plausible justification for a wide range of possible calls. Further, topics are human decided (either by vote in US formats or by a group of tournament officials (called the Chief Ad