AI's opportunities for participation
/AI's opportunities for participation
So why bother? Up until now, we've primarily discussed the downsides to using AI for participation. Fortunately, there are some great upsides, as well. Before you start, consider asking your own community how they feel about using AI in the context of a participation program. The public’s view is nuanced about the benefits and drawbacks of AI for public uses. Just like involving your constituents in the overall design of your participatory process, inviting them to share their hopes, concerns, and feelings about AI features can help you secure the buy-in you need from participants.
A key benefit used to promote AI usage is efficiency. Running a participatory process can be an expensive, time-consuming endeavor. If done right, integrating AI in the right spots throughout the process can make for a far faster, cheaper, and more engaging process.
AI can also make participatory platforms far more inclusive. It's being widely used to translate materials and participants' own proposals into a more diverse set of languages. AI's ability to improve transcription of speech is lowering technical and literacy barriers to engaging that is likely to improve representation of different points of view.
AI also makes new modes of engagement possible. For example, the ability of the Pol.is platform to map mathematically valid areas of consensus between rival political factions just wasn't practical to incorporate into a participation program before its release.
AI summarization tech allows hosts to ask more open-ended questions, or scale large numbers of small group discussions, facilitating deeper levels of engagement. Digital participation platforms have begun rolling out features that make participatory processes easier for everyone involved and, sometimes, more powerful. So far, we're primarily seeing existing digital participation platforms roll out AI features. There are some AI-native participation platforms, too, but they haven't gained significant traction yet.
Most commonly observed AI features on participation platforms
In December 2024, our team researched how AI is showing up on 30 participation platforms. We found the following AI applications to be the most common, in order of frequency:
Translation
Sentiment analysis
Topic clustering
AI discussion moderation
Parsing and summarizing large amounts of text
Chatbots
Generating images
Feature-level integration
So far, most of the digital participation platforms integrating AI are introducing it at specific points, embedding it within existing tools to power specific features, rather than launching fully-AI products. Your experience as a user or administrator of a digital participation platform is likely to involve encountering tactical AI support in the midst of an otherwise familiar digital user experience.
AI companies have made it easy for developers to integrate their APIs into their own platforms. This means an existing product can be set up to talk to ChatGPT on behalf of a user without having to leave the app. For example, you gain the ability to summarize or "ask questions of" a long PDF document from within a platform you already use.
Can't I just use mainstream AI tools for this?
Yes and no. As you've no doubt seen, tech companies are baking AI features into every conceivable product and user interface. For example, web searches now return AI summaries above the link results. You can now call Google's Gemini AI in a spreadsheet formula and tell it what to do with the contents of another cell.
Still, there's a reason that purpose-built software exists, and democratic participation is a special enough use case to warrant extra attention. Uploading a data export to ChatGPT for analysis, for example, will only get you so far. A digital participation platform that has thoughtfully integrated AI will be providing the model with important context, like how the process works and what the AI should prioritize in its analysis.
Not all participatory AI directly maps to this chronological arrangement, of course. Pol.is's new geo.pol.is product, for example, allows cities and countries to host permanent place-based versions of the platform. That way residents of that place can engage with each other on an ongoing basis, instead of in a limited campaign period. (Previously, the pol.is platform was deployed for a more limited time period instead of being always-available).