Democratic inputs to AI

Democratic inputs to AI | OpenAI

May 25, 2023

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Democratic inputs to AI

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Our nonprofit organization, OpenAI, Inc., is launching a program to award ten $100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow, within the bounds defined by the law.

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 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, 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.

What do we mean by a “democratic process”?

By “democratic process,” we mean a process in which a broadly representative group of peopleA exchange opinions, engage in deliberative discussions,B and ultimately decide on an outcome via a transparent decision making process.C There are many ways such a process could be structured—we encourage applicants to be innovative, building off known methodologies, and coming up with wholly new approaches. Examples of creative approaches that inspire us include Wikipedia⁠, Twitter Community Notes⁠, DemocracyNext⁠, Platform Assemblies⁠, MetaGov⁠, RadicalxChange⁠, People Powered⁠, Collective Response Systems⁠, and pol.is⁠. Another notable ongoing effort is led by the Collective Intelligence Project⁠(CIP), with whom we are partnering on public input to AI, contributing to their upcoming Alignment Assemblies⁠. We also encourage applicants to envision how AI could enhance⁠ the democratic process. For example, AI could enable⁠ more efficient communication among numerous people.

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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 washing⁠. 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.

Instructions for participation

To apply for a grant, we invite you to submit the required application material by 9:00 pm PDT June 24, 2023. You can access the application portal here⁠. You will be prompted to answer a series of questions regarding your team’s background, your choice of questions, high level details of your proposed tool as well as your plan for conducting and evaluating the democratic process with these factors⁠ in mind. We would like you to design your approach to address one or more of the policy questions from the list provided⁠. Anyone (individuals or organizations) can apply for this opportunity, regardless of their background in social science or AI.

Once the application period closes, we hope to select ten successful grant recipients. Recipients may be individuals, teams, or organizations. Each recipient will receive a $100,000 grant to pilot their proposal as described in their application materials. Grant recipients are expected to implement a proof-of-concept / prototype, engaging at least 500 participants and will be required to publish a public report on their findings by October 20, 2023. Additionally, as part of the grant program, any code or other intellectual property developed for the project will be required to be made publicly available pursuant to an open-source license. The terms applicable to grant recipients are specified in the Grant Terms and any other agreements that grant recipients may be asked to enter into with us in connection with this program.

Apply and start the submission process⁠.

Timeline

• June 24, 2023 9:00 pm Pacific Time: Deadline to submit grant application
• July 14, 2023: Successful applicants will be selected and notified
• October 20, 2023: Complete public report of working prototype and results

Policy statements under consideration

To participate, teams should choose one or more questions from the provided list to showcase their proposed approach. They may also create their own questions if desired. Importantly, we encourage teams to consider questions for which a simple “yes” or “no” answer would be inadequate, necessitating a nuanced policy proposal instead.

The scope of this grant pertains to policy questions concerning model behavior, as it enables A/B tests with modified model behavior according to the policy recommendations. We acknowledge the limitations of this grant and recognize that numerous AI issues could be…