AI could help people find common ground during deliberations

Participants were divided up into six-person groups, with one participant in each randomly assigned to write statements on behalf of the group. This person was designated the “mediator.” In each round of deliberation, participants were presented with one statement from the human mediator and one AI-generated statement from the HM and asked which they preferred. 

More than half (56%) of the time, the participants chose the AI statement. They found these statements to be of higher quality than those produced by the human mediator and tended to endorse them more strongly. After deliberating with the help of the AI mediator, the small groups of participants were less divided in their positions on the issues. 

Although the research demonstrates that AI systems are good at generating summaries reflecting group opinions, it’s important to be aware that their usefulness has limits, says Joongi Shin, a researcher at Aalto University who studies generative AI. 

“Unless the situation or the context is very clearly open, so they can see the information that was inputted into the system and not just the summaries it produces, I think these kinds of systems could cause ethical issues,” he says. 

Google DeepMind did not explicitly tell participants in the human mediator experiment that an AI system would be generating group opinion statements, although it indicated on the consent form that algorithms would be involved. 

 “It’s also important to acknowledge that the model, in its current form, is limited in its capacity to handle certain aspects of real-world deliberation,” Tessler says. “For example, it doesn’t have the mediation-relevant capacities of fact-checking, staying on topic, or moderating the discourse.” 

Figuring out where and how this kind of technology could be used in the future would require further research to ensure responsible and safe deployment. The company says it has no plans to launch the model publicly.