AI DeMoS Lab

The AI DeMoS Lab focuses on developing AI for democracy. They explore how AI can help to find a way of coming together amid multiple perspectives, and how they can help to craft a space for public interaction and deliberation. AI can be considered as a ‘demos’, one of the units in democratic societies. This is because it gives people a way of expressing themselves through visual, written and spoken activity modes (i.e. multimodal) – including generating textual narratives, digital personas and dialogical interfaces.

Two questions are key: how does AI facilitate our practice of democracy and the way we understand it; and how can we facilitate the responsible design and use of AI systems for a meaningful democratic engagement? The DeMoS Lab intends to contribute to the development of multimodal AI systems that foster deliberation and critical engagement by citizens. This will enable people to take informed decisions under the conditions of the very same deep uncertainty that these AI developments bring forth.

Researchers at the DeMoS Lab explore:

• How synthetic media (deepfakes and GPT3) impact and foster human interrelation and trust.
• How social media algorithms co-shape an ideal of and can contribute to being a good political subject that can thrive in plurality and critically engage with others.
• The impact of voice assistants and chatbots and how they can improve representation and inclusiveness.
• How algorithmic systems in the city affect political deliberation, and how they can enlarge the space for critical and informed engagement with AI systems needed to support our collective life.

The DeMoS Lab is part of the TU Delft AI Labs programme. For more information about the lab and its projects, publication, and code; visit their TU Delft page!