AI & Democracy Foundation

Our Vision: A world where democracy keeps pace with AI.

We need alternatives to both (a) dangerous concentrations of AI power and (b) the risks of providing unfettered access to increasingly capable AI systems.

We believe that high-quality deliberative democratic processes for decision-making on AI (and with AI) can provide a path forward, mitigating both kinds of risk—and enable us to maintain democracy in a world increasingly dominated by AI.

To learn more, see this essay from our founder and our democracy levels paper.

Building democratic capability

We work with democratic practitioners, facilitators, process convenors, researchers, tool builders, funders, and governments to work towards an ecosystem that can support high-quality democratic systems + decision processes.

Process Pattern Language and Deliberative Workflows

In collaboration with others, we're developing a standardized pattern language for the design and execution of collective decision-making processes, to help knowledge about best practice accumulate and transfer across contexts.

Research Directions: AI for Deliberative Democracy

We're developing a set of open research questions that direct new AI capabilities at existing challenges in deliberative democracy, such as scenario testing, multi-modal learning, and facilitator information management.

Deliberative Tools Access Program

We support access to deliberative tools for organizations and independent researchers to experiment, learn, and develop a progressively more robust ecosystem of deliberative tools.

Facilitator Resource Sharing Groups

We coordinate groups of world-class deliberation facilitators and practitioners to enable resource sharing, practice experimentation, and research scoping.

Realizing democratic AI

Decisions about how AI transforms society should not be made unilaterally. We work with frontier AI companies, governments, researchers, and civil society to drive the design and adoption of meaningfully democratic systems for AI alignment + governance.

Democracy Levels

A framework for evaluating the degree to which decisions in a given domain are made democratically. The framework can be used to define milestones in a roadmap for the democratic AI, pluralistic AI, participatory AI, and public AI ecosystems.

Safeguarded AI

For ARIA, we're designing and building processes for deliberatively defining formal safety specifications for advanced AI systems, and developing legal structures for AI organizations that would allow them to commit to acting in accordance with such collective decisions.

Case Law for AI

We draw ideas from the legal framework of "case law" to supplement current AI alignment efforts that have centered around "constitutional" style policies. The goal of this work is to build a judicial inspired framework for AI decision-making.

Who we are

Media

"Meta Ran a Giant Experiment in Governance. Now It's Turning to AI" Wired (2023)
"Facebook's big new experiment in governance" Platformer (2022)
Aviv Ovadya on "platform democracy" The New York Times (2022)

Work with us

AIDF is growing. We’re hiring for the following role:

Director of AI Strategy

Support

Want to help? Let us know here.

Contact

email: info@aidemocracyfoundation.org