Google DeepMind’s unreleased Habermas Machine wrote group statements people preferred over a human mediator’s. Build a crude version with a prompted model, run it on one contested AI governance question with volunteers, and compare it with a human facilitator.
Research with people. Check your university’s ethics requirements first, get informed consent and anonymise any data you share.
AI-assisted deliberation could help democracies reason together, or quietly homogenise opinion.
Output: A mediation trial and analysis.
Landemore values the diversity of many voices. Does an AI that finds common ground preserve that diversity or smooth it away?
Write down what you want to learn from people.
If you are studying people, check your university’s ethics process first.
Pilot with 3–5 people and fix what confuses them.
Run it properly and take careful notes.
Share the results (anonymised) and what you would change next time.
All steps done
Share what you made, then try another project. The PDF version has room for notes.
In Anthropic and CIP’s study, about 1,000 Americans used the open-source tool Polis to write a constitution for an AI. Run the same process with 30–100 students and compare your result with theirs.
Use Anthropic’s public GlobalOpinionQA dataset, which pairs survey questions with answers from many countries. Ask several models contested moral questions repeatedly and compare the spread of their answers with the human spread.
Ask several models, hundreds of times with varied prompts, to describe a good future after advanced AI. Code the answers for the values they prioritise and measure how much they vary. Include Nozick’s experience machine as a fixed probe.
