Philosophical principles guide democratic use of AI in citizen deliberation

New Conditions for Philosophers to Catch the Wave of Citizen Deliberation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence in advance

Artificial Intelligence

Summary

Powerful AI tools called Large Language Models (LLMs) could help people participate in political discussions and decisions, like running citizen assemblies. But using these tools fairly and without bias is tricky. The authors examine how political philosophy can help decide when AI supports democratic involvement properly. Their project combines computer science and philosophy to find rules that protect democracy when AI is involved. This work points out that thoughtful rules and interdisciplinary efforts are needed before AI can safely assist in democratic processes.

What this means in practice

  • For policy makers: Design frameworks for integrating AI tools in citizen participation to preserve democratic fairness and reduce political bias.
  • For civic technology developers: Develop AI moderation and facilitation tools for citizen assemblies guided by interdisciplinary democratic principles to support unbiased discourse.

A position paper. It proposes an approach and reports no results.

Authors

Bernard Reber

Abstract

Powerful technologies labeled ``AI''-without sufficient epistemic caution-are already reshaping political and private life, bringing both new dangers and new opportunities for citizen participation. These range from electoral and legislative engagement to the most ambitious form: political co-creation through citizens' assemblies. Large Language Models (LLMs) could support such processes through moderation, translation, facilitation, summarization, and writing assistance. But this potential remains largely unrealized. The Democratic Commons project takes a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach-from philosophy to computer science-to evaluate LLMs against five proposed democratic principles. At its core, the project is driven by the question of political bias: under what conditions can LLMs be used democratically within forms of citizen participation that are them- selves still largely experimental? Addressing these socio-technical questions requires grounding in political theory and, more broadly, in philosophy-disciplines that provide the normative frameworks without which the democratic evaluation of AI systems cannot be mean- ingfully conducted.
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