Enhancing Democratic Deliberations with AI: Insights from the ORBIS Co-creation Journey

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to transform the public sector, particularly in the domain of public deliberation and democratic governance, it also presents distinct challenges. This chapter explores the insights from the ORBIS project, which is situated at the intersection of AI technology and democratic processes. The chapter will critically present and discuss how the project is contributing to advance AI-enhanced democratic and inclusive deliberations by developing AI tools that are ethically grounded and trustworthy by-design. These tools are designed to enhance the accessibility, understandability, and overall quality of deliberative processes, enabling broader participation and facilitating a deeper comprehension of diverse public opinions across various policy issues. By employing advanced data analytics, NLP models, and algorithms for distilling a large volume of public inputs into actionable insights, ORBIS serves as a privilege testbed for discussing how to engage stakeholders into the design of AI-based tools, ensuring their social relevance. This chapter focuses on how the processes of continuous and iterative stakeholder engagement and co-creation have been adopted to ensure alignment of AI functionalities with user needs and democratic values, thus exploring implications towards enhancing the legitimacy of the policymaking process. The discussion highlights how ORBIS serves as a model for integrating AI into scalable democratic practices for public decision-making, reflecting on both the technological advancements and ethical considerations essential for responsible AI deployment in public decision-making.