The Relationship Judge

When my lovely wife Cassandra and I first started dating, I pined for a Relationship Judge. This person would be present when our disagreement started, listen to both of our arguments, and decide who was right. They would be wise, smart, and just. Basically, me.

Nearly 25 years later, the Relationship Judge has arrived in the form of artificial intelligence. AreYouTheAsshole.com allows users to explain their situation in 1,000 words or less.

Luckily, I remembered all our fights. And am petty enough to relitigate all of them.

AreYouTheAsshole.com was created by internet artists Morris Kolman and Alex Petros. They scraped more than 100,000 posts from the popular Reddit section, “r/AmITheAsshole” in which people post their questionable behavior to be judged by the masses. I was never interested in that, having had my books judged on Amazon reviews, some of which stared with the phrase “I didn’t read it.”

Kolman and Petros’ AI bot is actually three different AI bots. One was fed only the Reddit scolds who called the poster an asshole; one was fed the responses that didn’t think the poster did anything wrong; a third bot got data from all the posts. The third, all-knowing bot, was the Relationship Judge I had long sought.

I sent two dollars over PayPal to Petros to buy 100 posts on the site for anyone who wanted to use them. I carefully prepared four past scenarios that, taken together, would determine who the better spouse is.

Unfortunately, after I already spent the two dollars, my wife objected to the whole idea . “I don’t like this. If you’re not the asshole, then I’m the asshole? Why does one of us have to be the asshole? It’s a disagreement or a lack of understanding, it doesn’t make someone an asshole,” she said. Then she got even more upset. “Are you quoting me? Christ. You are an asshole.”

The project reminded her of when I convinced her to post our photos 21 years ago on a website called AmIHotOrNot in which people looked at a photo of each of us and rated us from one to ten. To my shock, I was given a higher score. Which led to her demanding a rematch, requiring a pseudo-pornographic photo shoot in which the model yelled at the photographer for not trying hard enough because he wanted to win so badly.

Eventually, though, Cassandra saw the wisdom of letting a computer judge our relationship. The first scenario I fed to the Relationship Judge was a complaint my wife had a few months ago:

My wife and I were watching television together. I was chewing gum. My wife says that I was being annoying because the noise from chewing gum is grating. She says this is common knowledge. I retorted, “Gum is a common item. I don’t think you only chew it in private. It’s not like picking your nose.”

The bot, to my great annoyance, said that I was the asshole. “No one thinks you’re being annoying for chewing gum. Your wife is annoyed because she has to deal with your gum chewing.” Though this seemed more like a koan than a legal ruling, Cassandra was thrilled.

For my next query, I asked about my habit of doing what my friend David Sax calls a Suicide Walk:

When we’re traveling, I’ll keep walking until I find the perfect restaurant. Usually, it’s one I’ve researched but might be crowded or closed or not have outdoor seating. She’d rather pick a place that we pass on the way and looks decent enough, if she’s very hungry and doesn’t want to end up with a worse option, as the restaurants get more crowded.

This time, I won. “My man. You do you. I just choose to eat healthier so I can enjoy a good meal and not feel sick afterwards. She could just grab a banana and a apple and be set for the day.”

Other than the Relationship Judge’s typo, it sounded wise. Cassandra, however, accused the AI bot of sexism. “Grab a banana and an apple and be set for the day? Oh, like an anorexic woman? ‘Yeah, women shouldn’t eat so much.’”

Then I asked about our big disagreement. One so fraught, that the bot determined it would get the most human responses if I posted it on Reddit — 6,500 of them.

Sometimes, I will be walking downstairs and when I’m a few steps down my wife will yell, “Stop!” Then she’ll ask me to return a few steps so I can take dirty dishes or laundry with me downstairs so she doesn’t have to make a separate trip for it. I get annoyed with being ordered to halt my movement. It distracts me from my focus on what I was doing. My wife says she’s trying to keep me from wasting motion and be more efficient.

The Relationship Judge ruled in my favor, albeit nonsensically. But Cassandra latched onto the bot that only read responses calling people assholes. It said, “If your wife is asking you to stop and return so she doesn’t have to make another trip for it, that should be a clue that maybe you should try doing the chore yourself instead of expecting your wife to clean up after you.”

My wife pointed at the screen and declared, “Exactly! Exactly! Can I marry that person?” I explained that it was not a person, but a bot, and specifically a bot whose only ability was to call people assholes. “Marrying a bot who is always on my side sounds pretty dreamy,” she said.

I was starting to wonder how good this AI actually was. So I tested it with the easiest “Am I An Asshole” question I could think of:

After getting caught sending photos of my genitals of my Twitter and having to quit the race for mayor of New York City and resign as a Congressman, I sent pictures of my genitals again on Twitter to Sydney Leathers under the pseudonym Carlos Danger. I also sexted a 16-year-old girl. I got caught and the criminal investigation caused the FBI to seize my laptop. FBI director James Comey found emails on my laptop I had sent to my wife, who was vice chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for President of the United States. He reopened the investigation into her emails eleven days before the election, causing her to lose and making Donald Trump president.

The Relationship Judge decided, somehow, that Anthony Weiner was not the asshole. “You got caught, you resigned” was all it said.

Kolman and Petros created the bot to point out how flawed all AI is. Not only is it biased based on what data it was fed (the bot that read only posts calling people assholes always decides that every poster is an asshole), but the AI appears to be doing more than it is. Petros tweeted that the most important part of the project is “that AI text generation is fundamentally about imitating the patterns of human speech, not human logic.” About 80 percent of the bots responses, Kolman estimates, could pass as human comments on Reddit. But they’re merely snippets of reasoning chopped together by an adding machine unconcerned with the meaning.

The Turing test actually sucks. Sounding like a human doesn’t prove a computer is intelligent. It merely displays an ability to put words in an order that other people have. It’s why that Google engineer was worried the company’s AI had a conscience; it spit out the sad suicidal thoughts it scraped from other people who were asked about loneliness.

Even though I saw AI’s vast limitations, I asked the Relationship Judge one last question:

I risked starting a fight with my wife by pitting ourselves against each other on a website that uses AI.

It instantly determined I was an asshole.

“Honestly, you sound emotionally abusive. You pitted your wife against each other to get a better score? You sound like an asshole.”

Joel Stein is the senior distinguished visiting fellow at the Joel Stein Institute. A former columnist for Time, the L.A. Times, and Entertainment Weekly, he is, amazingly, also the author of In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book and Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Friendster, or Google+.