Fostering More Inclusive Democracy with AI

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Core argument: AI can enhance democratic institutions by ensuring citizens’ voices are truly heard, strengthening collective governance rather than simply enabling regulation.
Key concerns addressed:
- Fear that AI could undermine democracy, concentrate power in tech companies, and replace human decision-making with “algocracy.”
- Counterpoint: current human societies retain political capacity and responsibility to shape AI development and harness AI to strengthen democracy.

Longstanding efforts:
- For 40 years many governments have run experiments to include ordinary citizens in policymaking beyond voting.
- A 2020 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report found close to 600 cases where a random sample of citizens engages deeply and formulates informed policy recommendations.
Mass participation examples:
- Participatory constitutional processes in Brazil, Kenya, Nicaragua, South Africa, Uganda (1980s–1990s); more recently Chile, Egypt, Iceland.
- 2019 Great National Debate (France): 1.5 million participants.
- EU Conference on the Future of Europe: 5 million website visitors and 700,000 people engaging in debate.
Limitations of prior efforts:
- Mostly low-tech, analog; often no AI.
- Politicians overwhelmed by raw data, leading to citizen input being ignored.
- Deliberation quality often superficial.

Taiwan Province of China / pol.is:
- pol.is allows elaborated opinions, voting on others’ opinions, and maps opinion landscapes to identify consensus and minority views.
- Recent integration of machine learning: contributors can engage with an LLM that speaks for different opinion clusters, helping users locate allies and opponents and reducing polarization.
- Reach: platform used to consult 12 million people, or nearly half the population.
Corporate experiments:
- Meta Community Forums (2022): randomly selected users deliberated on climate content regulation.
- December 2022 Meta experiment: 6,000 users from 32 countries in 19 languages discussed cyberbullying in the metaverse over several days; AI facilitated speaking times, topic decisions, and pacing.
- Current evidence: no proof AI facilitators outperform humans yet, but AI facilitators will be considerably cheaper and could enable scaling deliberative processes from thousands to millions.

Functional advances:
- Instantaneous translation in multilinguistic groups as a near-term frontier.
- Summarization of collective deliberations to distill and surface citizen input.
Comparative performance:
- Recent research: AI is 50 percent more accurate than human beings for summarization (as evaluated by trained undergraduates comparing AI summaries and human coders’ summaries of deliberation transcripts).
Role of human judgment:
- Some human judgment likely remains necessary; AI can aid human analysts, facilitators, and translators.
Funding and development:
- OpenAI launched a grant program, Democratic inputs to AI, subsidizing the 10 most promising teams working on algorithms serving human deliberation.

Enumerated risks:
- Data bias, privacy concerns, potential for surveillance, legal challenges.
- Digital divide and potential exclusion of illiterate and techno‑skeptical groups.
Non-technological remedies:
- Many issues require political, economic, legal, and social solutions first, not technology alone.
Technological mitigations:
- Zero-knowledge protocols (zero-knowledge proofs, or ZKP) suggested to verify identity without collecting participant data (examples: text messaging authentication, blockchain); applicable for online voting, deliberative contexts, whistleblowing.
- Generative AI can expand access to scarce knowledge and tutoring, adapt explanations to individuals’ cognitive styles, produce images, and convert oral input to written input.

Democratic engagement in AI governance:
- Greater citizen voice and input are needed in AI governance domestically and at the international institutional level.
- AI-empowered democracies could enforce AI regulation more effectively and legitimize oversight capacities.
Investment priorities:
- Urgent investment in AI tools that safely augment participatory and deliberative potential of governments.
- Support for algorithmic tools and platforms that scale deliberation and ensure inclusivity (including translation, summarization, and privacy-preserving identity verification).
Caution:
- Balance enthusiasm with safeguards to prevent democracy itself from becoming a casualty of the AI revolution.

40 years
close to 600 cases
1.5 million participants
5 million people to visit the website and 700,000 to engage in debate
pol.is engaged 12 million people, or nearly half the population
2022 (Meta experiments)
December 2022
6,000 users from 32 countries in 19 languages
AI is 50 percent more accurate than human beings for summarization (per cited research)
Democratic inputs to AI grants subsidized the 10 most promising teams

Fostering More Inclusive Democracy with AI by HÉLÈNE LANDEMORE, F&D Magazine, December 2023

Point of View: Fostering More Inclusive Democracy with AI
- Point of View: Fostering More Inclusive Democracy with AI (Markdown version)
- Point of View: Fostering More Inclusive Democracy with AI (PDF)