Artificial Intelligence for Mass Democratic Deliberations: The AI4Deliberation Project Objectives and Methodology

Abstract

Democracy is facing challenges including loss of trust in institutions, disillusionment and declining interest among citizens, increasing political polarisation, online disinformation and politically manipulated information, and a growing distance between citizens and elected representatives. This can change if proper deliberative processes and tools are institutionalised that exploit the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and citizens’ post-Covid competencies. The next generation of digital deliberations could be grounded on solid democracy theory, multimodal, usable and accessible, gamified, mass, enabled by the novel but also legal and ethical AI features, and easily adopted and institutionalized. In this context, the AI4Deliberation project aims to provide robust, ethical AI tools and comprehensive guidance to assist governments in institutionalising, using and evaluating multimodal, gamified, mass deliberations. In this paper, we present the project’s objectives, approach, pilots, expected results, and impact.