← Back to all news
MIT News AI

Following the questions where they lead

Assistant Professor Bailey Flanigan has arrived at complex computational methods for helping democracy thrive.

Related stories

arXiv AI
Sep 15

New Conditions for Philosophers to Catch the Wave of Citizen Deliberation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence in advance

The paper proposes new conditions for philosophers to engage with citizen deliberation in the AI era, focusing on how Large Language Models (LLMs) could support democratic processes such as citizen assemblies. It outlines the Democratic Commons project, an interdisciplinary effort that evaluates LLMs against five democratic principles, with a central concern about political bias and the democratic use of AI in experimental participatory settings. The study emphasizes the need for philosophical and political theory foundations to meaningfully assess AI’s role in democratic participation.

By Bernard Reber (CEVIPOF)
llmsnlpsafety
More like this →
arXiv AI
Sep 18

AI Should Facilitate Democratic Deliberation at Scale

The paper argues that AI can strengthen democracy by supporting large‑scale deliberation, addressing cognitive, social, platform‑design, and market frictions while preserving human agency. It contrasts AI‑assisted deliberation with liquid democracy, claiming the former lowers barriers to meaningful engagement without replacing human judgment. The authors outline four guiding principles—preserving agency, encouraging mutual respect, promoting equality, and augmenting active citizenship—and discuss challenges such as alignment, sycophancy, bias, and over‑reliance. They call on the machine learning community to develop and evaluate deliberation‑focused AI systems based on their ability to facilitate informed, representative, and friction‑robust discourse.

By Jos\'e Ram\'on Enr\'iquez, Jiaxin Pei, Alex Pentland
safety
More like this →
MIT News AI
Jul 14

Helping AI models to meet the real world

Through research and entrepreneurship, Professor Devavrat Shah is helping to design methods that can handle constant decision-making using limited computational resources.

By David Chandler | Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
More like this →
OpenAI Blog
May 25, 2023

Democratic inputs to AI

Our nonprofit organization, OpenAI, Inc. , is launching a program to award ten $100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow, within the bounds defined by the law.

More like this →
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

Large Language Models as Implicit Sociological Models: Reconstructing Voting Behaviour from Sociodemographic Profiles

arXiv:2608. 15871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) trained on large-scale internet corpora encode extensive statistical regularities about social identities, attitudes, and political behaviour.

By Roman Neruda, Martin Bako\v{s}, Josef \v{S}lerka, V\'it Tu\v{c}ek, Petra Vidnerov\'a, Gabriela Kadlecov\'a
llms
More like this →
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Social Simulations: from Agent-Based Modeling to Digital Twins

arXiv:2607. 13693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This book chapter covers the evolution of social simulation from classical agent-based models, in which agents interact according to explicitly defined behavioral rules, to AI-enhanced simulations based on Large Language Models and, ultimately, Social Digital Twins: high-fidelity, data-driven representations of real-world socio-technical systems.

By Erica Cau, Andrea Failla, Valentina Pansanella, Giulio Rossetti
llmsagents
More like this →