Democratic inputs to AI

# Democratic inputs to AI Source: [https://openai.com/index/democratic-inputs-to-ai/](https://openai.com/index/democratic-inputs-to-ai/) AI will have significant, far\-reaching economic and societal impacts\. Technology shapes the lives of individuals, how we interact with one another, and how society as a whole evolves\. We believe that decisions about how AI behaves should be shaped by diverse perspectives reflecting the public interest\. ​​Laws encode values and norms to regulate behavior\. Beyond a legal framework, AI, much like society, needs more intricate and adaptive guidelines for its conduct\. For example: under what conditions should AI systems condemn or criticize public figures, given different opinions across groups regarding those figures? How should disputed views be represented in AI outputs? Should AI by default reflect the persona of a median individual in the world, the user’s country, the user’s demographic, or something entirely different? No single individual, company, or even country should dictate these decisions\. [AGI⁠](https://openai.com/charter/)should benefit all of humanity and be shaped to be as inclusive as possible\. We are launching this grant program to take a first step in this direction\. We are seeking teams from across the world to develop proof\-of\-concepts for a democratic process that could answer questions about what rules AI systems should follow\. We want to learn from these experiments, and use them as the basis for a more global, and more ambitious process going forward\. While these initial experiments are not \(at least for now\) intended to be binding for decisions, we hope that they explore decision relevant questions and build novel democratic tools that can more directly inform decisions in the future\. The[governance of the most powerful systems⁠](https://openai.com/index/governance-of-superintelligence/), as well as decisions regarding their deployment, must have strong public oversight\. This grant represents a step to establish democratic processes for overseeing AGI and, ultimately, superintelligence\. It will be provided by the OpenAI non\-profit organization, and the results of the studies will be freely accessible\. Several issues can undermine democratic processes, such as the failure to adequately represent minority or majority groups, manipulation by special interest groups, insufficiently informed participants, or[participation⁠\(opens in a new window\)](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4266250)[washing⁠\(opens in a new window\)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.02423)\. We are looking for teams who proactively address these failure modes, and demonstrate awareness of the potential flaws and downsides of various approaches\. Ultimately, designing truly democratic processes is a high bar to meet, and we view our efforts as complements rather than substitutes for regulation of AI by governments; this program encourages best\-effort, democratic\-in\-spirit processes involving deliberation and broad public input as stepping stones\.