How to help democracy keep pace with AI
Potential developments for helping democratic processes to effectively govern AI.
If our democratic processes are going to keep pace with AI, we need to use advanced technology and research to unlock new capabilities. AI, language models, and machine learning are well positioned to contribute to deliberative processes, and we have a long list of their potential uses.
This page includes sections for:
Products to build
Some products specifically require harnessing AI whether for sensemaking, research, or facilitation.
AI Assurance Infra (Bias, Accuracy, etc.)
Urgent
Infrastructure for providing commitments around bias and accuracy, control over training data usage, comprehensive logging/evaluation, and offline operation capabilities for any integrated AI system.
AI In-Person Facilitator
AI agent that provides real-time group facilitation for in-person deliberative processes, managing participation equity, topic focus, conflict resolution, and shared understanding across multiple simultaneous breakout groups.
AI Manipulation Detection System
Urgent
Real-time AI-enhanced monitoring and detection system that identifies manipulation attempts, whether AI-generated or human-orchestrated, across all stages of deliberative processes: from recruitment and selection gaming to astroturfing in discussions, coordinated voting patterns, and output tampering.
AI Online Facilitator
Urgent
AI agent that provides real-time group facilitation for deliberative processes, managing participation equity, topic focus, conflict resolution, and shared understanding across multiple simultaneous breakout groups.
Automated Recruitment Tool
Urgent
AI-powered recruitment system that automates demographic targeting, campaign creation, multi-channel outreach, and participant selection using real-time census-like data and advanced selection methodologies.
Babelfish
Real-time translation infrastructure for multi-language deliberative processes that captures all audio and written inputs (microphone, documents, handwritten notes) and provides instantaneous translation to each participant’s selected language through on-screen display or in-ear devices.
Context Mapper
Urgent
Tool automatically generates comprehensive context analysis, process planning inputs, and accessible participant briefing materials with visual aids by processing uploaded information (PDFs, transcripts, emails, recordings) and conducting interviews with stakeholders.
Decision Impact Forecasting and Modeling
Urgent
Interface where participants input policy proposals and receive impact models, showing effects on both targeted and related outcomes with confidence intervals, assumptions, and interactive exploration capabilities.
Opinion Mapper
Urgent
Tool that connects to recording devices and data sources to instantly analyze participant contributions, creating real-time visualizations of views, consensus areas, and divisions on any topic throughout deliberative processes.
Personal Deliberation Partner
Personalized chatbot available to each participant before, during, and after deliberative processes, designed to guide them through the process, ask probing questions, provide relevant information, and help participants explore their own thoughts and understand diverse perspectives.
Process Design Simulation Sandbox
Urgent
Simulation environment that tests deliberative process designs by running multiple simulated processes, and predicting outcome distributions to show how design choices impact results.
Smart Templates (AI-supported real-time format support)
System for helping ensure that the outputs of a task are in the right form, e.g., by evaluating content’s fit to a specified template and instruction, and giving feedback as comments, suggested edits, or through chat.
Research to do
Before we can build advanced products, we need fundamental research that demonstrates what can be done by answering any of the AI and ML research questions we have listed here.
Can AI generate its own suggested changes and test them to search the latent space for optimal solutions?
Urgent
What design variables in deliberative formats can AI systems reliably identify as leverage points for optimization through automated multi-agent simulation?
Urgent
How can lessons from speculative execution and speculative decoding help increase the availability of deliberative processes through reduced costs?
Urgent
What are the key technical blockers (agent behavior calibration, emergent group dynamics modeling, preference faithfulness) to effective and trustworthy multi-agent simulation, and which are tractable with current methods?
Urgent
What is the Pareto frontier of speed, accuracy and easy-to-use interactability?
Urgent
Which transcription and annotation approaches (comparing human verbatim, human semantic, hybrid human-AI, or AI-only) best handle cross-talk, non-verbal communication, and emotional valence while maintaining accuracy standards?
Urgent
How can cryptographic mechanisms create locking mechanisms and binding incentive structures?
How can technically binding decisions integrate with AI alignment in gradual ways?
How can we design adaptive learning systems that provide personalized learning programs?
Urgent
How can individual learning agents identify and pair learning partners for defined objectives (idea crosspollination, depolarization, information gaps)?
Urgent
How can AI systems translate, generate and integrate learning materials into diverse formats (text, audio, visual, etc)?
Urgent
How can we develop real-time detection systems for coordinated manipulation attempts during participant recruitment and selection?
Urgent