In a recent paper in Science, the company showed that an AI system using large language models could act as mediator in group discussions and help find points of agreement on contentious issues.
They built an AI tool that could summarize and synthesize the views of a small group of humans into a shared statement. The language model was asked to maximize the overall approval rating from the group as a whole.
Group members then critiqued the statement, and the model used this to produce a fresh draft-a feedback loop that was repeated multiple times. To test the approach, the researchers recruited around 5,000 people in the UK through a crowdsourcing platform and split them into groups of six.
The team found participants preferred the AI summaries 56 percent of the time, suggesting the technology was doing a good job capturing group opinion.
The researchers determined that after going through the AI mediation process a measure of group agreement increased by about eight percent on average. Participants also reported their view had moved closer to the group opinion after 30 percent of the deliberation rounds.
One of the key attributes of the AI-generated group statements, the authors noted, was that they did a good job incorporating the views of dissenting voices while respecting the majority position.
The group deliberated over nine contentious questions, and afterwards, the researchers again found a significant increase in group agreement.