In preparing for the consequences of AI it is arguably equally important to flesh out the world that we want as well as the a world that we fear. I acknowledge that as “a powerful tool, AI can equally be used to silence, amplify, or distort the public voice”; however, my interest for this piece to focus on the positive as opposed to the negative case—more on the negative case is in the references. It is almost inevitable that AI will shape public discourse (it already does) - my article aims to discuss the ways that this could be done more fruitfully. It is also notable that everything proposed is either human-in-the-loop or human-on-the-loop and does not put AI directly in control of government as opposed to existing popular proposals [4].
RoscoHunter
Thank you very much for sending this paper through. It provides a very detailed exploration of ideas that are closely related to my article. I completely agree with you that moving beyond 1-dimensional voter feedback (signing petitions/voting) for some components of political life may be truly transformative. However, I also agree that presently these systems are not possible and trust-worthy on large scales as they lack performance and surrounding infrastructure. Personally, I see the performance issue as less consequential. Although hallucinated and overlooked conditions may remain a persistent problem for LLMs, their performance in reasoning tasks is rapidly improving with advancements like COT prompting and its extensions. As such, we should at the very least start preparing for the next generation of highly competent language models. In my opinion, the trustworthiness and security of digital public infrastructure is likely to remain a thornier problem. However, verifying humans online (as opposed to bots) and monitoring algorithms for adversarial attacks are problems of broad societal concern—and as such will hopefully receive increasing efforts and attention in the coming years.
This fits very nicely as an antidote to the criticisms of AI from the following discussion: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/podcasts/ai-vibe-check-with-ezra-klein-and-kevin-tries-phone-positivity.html?