Democratic AI is Possible. The Democracy Levels Framework Shows How It Might Work

Abstract

This position paper argues that effectively "democratizing AI" requires democratic governance and alignment of AI, and that this is particularly valuable for decisions with systemic societal impacts. Initial steps -- such as Meta's Community Forums and Anthropic's Collective Constitutional AI -- have illustrated a promising direction, where democratic processes could be used to meaningfully improve public involvement and trust in critical decisions. To more concretely explore what increasingly democratic AI might look like, we provide a "Democracy Levels" framework and associated tools that: (i) define milestones toward meaningfully democratic AI, which is also crucial for substantively pluralistic, human-centered, participatory, and public-interest AI, (ii) can help guide organizations seeking to increase the legitimacy of their decisions on difficult AI governance and alignment questions, and (iii) support the evaluation of such efforts.

31 pages. Accepted to the position paper track at ICML 2025. A previous version was presented at the Pluralistic Alignment Workshop at NeurIPS 2024. For ongoing work, see: https://democracylevels.org