Agora: Teaching the Skill of Consensus-Finding with AI Personas Grounded in Human Voice

TL;DR

Agora is an AI-driven platform that enhances civic education by helping users develop consensus-finding skills through engaging with authentic human voices and perspectives on policy issues.

Contribution

The paper introduces Agora, a novel AI-powered platform that uses LLMs to facilitate deliberation and perspective-taking, aiming to scale civic education beyond traditional methods.

Findings

Access to voice explanations improved perspective-taking.

Participants acknowledged multiple viewpoints more after using Agora.

Preliminary study shows potential for civic skill development.

Abstract

Deliberative democratic theory suggests that civic competence: the capacity to navigate disagreement, weigh competing values, and arrive at collective decisions is not innate but developed through practice. Yet opportunities to cultivate these skills remain limited, as traditional deliberative processes like citizens' assemblies reach only a small fraction of the population. We present Agora, an AI-powered platform that uses LLMs to organize authentic human voices on policy issues, helping users build consensus-finding skills by proposing and revising policy recommendations, hearing supporting and opposing perspectives, and receiving feedback on how policy changes affect predicted support. In a preliminary study with 44 university students, access to the full interface with voice explanations, as opposed to aggregate support distributions alone, significantly improved self-reported perspective-taking and the extent to which statements acknowledged multiple viewpoints. These findings point toward a promising direction for scaling civic education.