How Artificial Intelligence Can Aid Democracy

There’s good reason to fear that A.I. systems like ChatGPT and GPT4 will harm democracy. Public debate may be overwhelmed by industrial quantities of autogenerated argument. People might fall down political rabbit holes, taken in by superficially convincing bullshit, or obsessed by folies à deux relationships with machine personalities that don’t really exist.

These risks may be the fallout of a world where businesses deploy poorly tested A.I. systems in a battle for market share, each hoping to establish a monopoly.

But dystopia isn’t the only possible future. A.I. could advance the public good, not private profit, and bolster democracy instead of undermining it. That would require an A.I. not under the control of a large tech monopoly, but rather developed by government and available to all citizens. This public option is within reach if we want it.

An A.I. built for public benefit could be tailor-made for those use cases where technology can best help democracy. It could plausibly educate citizens, help them deliberate together, summarize what they think, and find possible common ground. Politicians might use large language models, or LLMs, like GPT4 to better understand what their citizens want.