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.
Research with people. Check your university’s ethics requirements first, get informed consent and anonymise any data you share.
It needs no compute, works as a society event and produces something to compare with a published study. The source list recommends starting here.
Output: A Polis process, a constitution, and a comparison.
Does a student group’s constitution have any legitimacy? Use the SEP’s instrumental and intrinsic justifications of democracy to argue what a process like this can and cannot confer.
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.
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.
List every place a published AI constitution asks a model to act on its own values, and every place it asks the model to accept correction. Find where both apply and conflict.
Lange argues AI outputs should count as one input alongside our own reasons, not replace them. Run a small study: show volunteers AI answers (some reliable, some subtly wrong) and measure how much they update.
