Democratic Policy Development using Collective Dialogues and AI

Abstract: We design and test an efficient democratic process for developing policies that reflect informed public will. The process combines AI-enabled collective dialogues that make deliberation democratically viable at scale with bridging-based ranking for automated consensus discovery. A GPT4-powered pipeline translates points of consensus into representative policy clauses from which an initial policy is assembled. The initial policy is iteratively refined with the input of experts and the public before a final vote and evaluation. We test the process three times with the US public, developing policy guidelines for AI assistants related to medical advice, vaccine information, and wars & conflicts. We show the process can be run in two weeks with 1500+ participants for around $10,000, and that it generates policy guidelines with strong public support across demographic divides. We measure 75-81% support for the policy guidelines overall, and no less than 70-75% support across demographic splits spanning age, gender, religion, race, education, and political party. Overall, this work demonstrates an end-to-end proof of concept for a process we believe can help AI labs develop common-ground policies, governing bodies break political gridlock, and diplomats accelerate peace deals.