Human/AI Collective Intelligence for Deliberative Democracy: A Human-Centred Design Approach

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a human-centered design approach to integrating AI in collective intelligence systems to enhance deliberative democracy, emphasizing stakeholder participation and trustworthiness.

Contribution

It introduces the CI4DD framework, combining human-centered design with AI to improve democratic deliberation processes, supported by co-design methodology and real-world case studies.

Findings

AI-supported civic tools were successfully piloted in authentic contexts.

Stakeholder engagement improved through human-centered co-design.

Technical implications for trustworthy AI in democracy were identified.

Abstract

This chapter introduces the concept of Collective Intelligence for Deliberative Democracy (CI4DD). We propose that the use of computational tools, specifically artificial intelligence to advance deliberative democracy, is an instantiation of a broader class of human-computer system designed to augment collective intelligence. Further, we argue for a fundamentally human-centred design approach to orchestrate how stakeholders can contribute meaningfully to shaping the artifacts and processes needed to create trustworthy DD processes. We first contextualise the key concepts of CI and the role of AI within it. We then detail our co-design methodology for identifying key challenges, refining user scenarios, and deriving technical implications. Two exemplar cases illustrate how user requirements from civic organisations were implemented with AI support and piloted in authentic contexts.