DebateGPT: A Debate adversary on any topic

Access

You can try out the demo at debategpt.emileamaj.xyz.

Introduction

DebateGPT is an AI adversary chatbot that can debate on any topic.
You select the topic, and start to debate right away.
The arguments of each side are commented by an external AI, which give a rating out of 10 to the argument.
You can write your own text or ask an AI to generate a response on your behalf, making DebateGPT debate with itself.
DebateGPT will always take the opposite side of your argument, and try to refute it.
It uses the gpt-4o-mini model to generate the responses to your arguments.

This project was inspired by Marc Andreessen's remarks on Lex Fridman's podcast 386 (at 15:40), where he talks about his experiments with GPT-4 debating with itself.

Interface

Set the topic of the debate, and click on "Start debate".

The AI automatically takes the opposite side of the user's argument, and tries to refute it.

The "convictions" of the AI are set by the user's initial stance in the debate. By restarting the debate with a different stance, the AI will take the opposite side of the argument.

Running the project

To run this project on your local machine, you need to have Node.js installed. The backend of this project is in Python and uses FastAPI. You also need to have an OpenAI API key, which you can generate here. You need to create .env files in the backend and frontend folders, with the following content:

Set the REACT_APP_BACKEND_URL variable to the URL of the backend server. ./frontend/.env

REACT_APP_BACKEND_URL=http://localhost:8000

./backend/.env

OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-xxxxxxxxx"

Where sk-xxxxxxxxx is your OpenAI API key.

In the frontend folder, run:

npm install

if this is the first time you run the project, or if you want to update the dependencies.

Then, in the same folder, run:

npm run start

To start the frontend dev server.

In the backend folder, run:

uvicorn main:app --port 8000

To start the backend server.

If everything went well, you should be able to access the project at http://localhost:3000.

To do

• Add a "share" button to share the debate thread
• Add rate-limiting to prevent abuse
• Add support for GPT-4
• Additional languages (currently only English is supported)
• Add debate parameters (aggressive, polite, good faith, etc.)
• Argument quality estimation
• Update ratings after argument text edition
• Debate winner estimation
• Allow editing of the user's arguments
• Allow the AI to respond to the AI's arguments
• Emulate depth of thought by adding a delay in the response