Article by Dean Jackson: “On a September day in 2024, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, sat on stage at the Amazon Web Service’s Public Sector Summit. His message: “AI needs to empower democracies and allow them to function better and remain competitive on the world stage.”
At a time when much of the conversation about AI and democracy still revolves around deepfakes and synthetic fakery, Amodei’s statement tapped an alternate vein. What if artificial intelligence could supplement democratic processes and institutions, lowering barriers to participation and making them more inclusive and representative?
It’s not an idle question; researchers and entrepreneurs are already designing tools and products with this premise in mind. Deployed thoughtfully, they just might deliver. If adopted carelessly, though, we could be on the verge of a civic-tech cash grab that harms where it promised to heal.
The Promise of AI-Facilitated Deliberation
It’s not just Amodei. Just days before his remarks, 23 scholars released a paper titled “How Will Advanced AI Systems Impact Democracy?” Their expectations are not rose-tinted; they warn of both opportunity and the potential for serious disruption of democratic processes and institutions.
The key throughline is language, the domain in which large language models (LLMs) excel. “Language,” the authors write,
allows information about candidates and policies to be shared with to [sic] voters, lawmakers to create legislation, and citizens and representatives to collectively discuss, deliberate and decide on which course of action to pursue. In liberal democracies, elected leaders use oratory to explain and justify their decisions and actions to the larger public, interest groups use persuasive messaging to lobby for their preferred policies, and the general public engages in debate, either informally or through organized events such as town halls and citizens’ assemblies.
These forms of communication and, more crucially, deliberation are the stuff of democracy. Research from cognitive science tells us that groups make better decisions when they deliberate. Research from political science shows that the process of deliberation doesn’t just change the decisions people make, it also changes how they feel about the deliberative outcome and one another.
Given this understanding, the authors’ recommendations also make sense. They write about “bridging algorithms” to encourage constructive dialogue rather than online conflict. They also refer to “new avenues” through which government officials and campaigning politicians can gain insight into the public’s views and concerns.
Major voices in the tech industry are especially bullish on this latter concept. In a recent essay in the MIT Technology Review, Andrew Sorota and Josh Handler—who work on AI policy for Eric Schmidt, former CEO and chairman of Google—note that “several states and localities are already using AI-mediated platforms to conduct democratic deliberation at scale, building on research showing that AI mediators can help citizens find common ground.”…(More)”.
