AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation

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​Agenda:
5:00pm – doors open
5:30pm – 6:30pm official talk and Q&A
6:30pm – 8:00pm networking

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Description of the talk:
Finding agreement through a free exchange of views is often difficult. Collective deliberation can be slow, difficult to scale, and unequally attentive to different voices.

In this study, our guest speakers from Google DeepMind, Michael Henry Tessler and Michiel Bakker, trained an AI to mediate human deliberation.

Using participants’ personal opinions and critiques, the AI mediator iteratively generates and refines statements that express common ground among the group on social or political issues.

Participants (N = 5734) preferred AI-generated statements to those written by human mediators, rating them as more informative, clear, and unbiased.

Discussants often updated their views after the deliberation, converging on a shared perspective. Text embeddings revealed that successful group statements incorporated dissenting voices while respecting the majority position.

These findings were replicated in a virtual citizens’ assembly involving a demographically representative sample of the UK population.