Bringing AI Participation Down to Scale: A Comment on Open AIs Democratic Inputs to AI Project
This addresses the problem of how to involve the public in AI governance, but it is incremental as it builds on existing critiques without proposing new methods.
The paper critiques OpenAI's Democratic Inputs program for its assumptions about scalable, single-model, consensus-driven public participation, and suggests alternative forms of participation not led by tech companies.
In 2023, Open AIs Democratic Inputs program funded 10 teams to design procedures for public participation in generative AI. In this Perspective, we review the results of the project, drawing on interviews with some of the teams and our own experiences conducting participation exercises, we identify several shared yet largely unspoken assumptions of the Democratic Inputs program 1. that participation must be scalable 2. that the object of participation is a single model 3. that there must be a single form of participation 4. that the goal is to extract abstract principles 5. that these principles should have consensus 6. that publics should be representative and encourage alternative forms of participation in AI, perhaps not undertaken by tech companies.