Global Citizen Deliberation on Artificial Intelligence: Options and design considerations
This report explores how global citizen deliberation, particularly drawing on the concept of a global citizens’ assembly, could and should shape the future of artificial intelligence. Drawing on an extended design lab of in-depth interviews and workshops that took place in mid-2024, it presents a series of options that illustrate a variety of opportunities to bring the voices of those affected by AI development and deployment into decision-making spaces, through processes that can deliver informed and inclusive dialogue.
The landscape of AI governance is rapidly evolving. There are open questions at many levels, from setting shared values and visions to guide AI development, to designing specific governance mechanisms or safety standards, and shaping the models and rules for individual and localized applications. There is growing consensus that these questions cannot be answered by the technology industry or individual governments alone. Global publics must be meaningfully involved.
The concept of a global citizens’ assembly is a powerful one: inviting individuals from across the globe to join in processes where they have access to expert insights, opportunities to learn, and facilitated space to deliberate together, bringing diverse perspectives and experiences to bear on questions of global importance. In this report we address how established and emerging sites of global AI development and governance can integrate citizen deliberation, setting out five template options: deliberative review of AI summits and scientific reports; an independent global assembly on AI; a series of distributed dialogues organized across the globe; a technology-enabled collective intelligence process; and commissioning of AI topics in other deliberative processes.
We present the strengths and weaknesses of these options, and outline additional design considerations they give rise to around recruitment, governance, agenda-setting, transnational dialogue and aggregation of findings, and the use of AI as a delivery tool. In doing so, we aim to support a critical assessment of emerging and future proposals for public participation on AI, both at the global and local level.
