Public Dialogue and AI

Public dialogue provides a way to generate evidence about where people see value in AI, the problems they want it to address, the conditions they place on its use and the trade-offs they are willing — or unwilling — to make. This creates an important source of knowledge for researchers, policymakers, and organisations deciding where and how AI should be developed and adopted.

Our work examines how public dialogue can contribute to the democratic direction of AI and to better technological and institutional choices. It asks how societal priorities can be surfaced early enough to influence research and innovation; how public perspectives can inform decisions about AI adoption; and how institutions can develop the capacity to continue listening and responding as technologies and their uses change.

The programme builds on earlier ML@CL research on participatory data governance and Data Trusts. More recent work through ai@cam has used large-scale public dialogues to explore public expectations for AI, including its potential role in government and public services.

Projects under this work strand have highlighted a gap between the supply of new technological capabilities and society’s ability to articulate and act on demand for them. Public dialogue can help make that demand more visible. It can reveal priorities that are poorly captured by existing markets or institutional processes, identify conditions for acceptable adoption, and expose differences between what is technically possible and what people consider useful or desirable.

Dialogue provides one means of understanding what successful adoption should achieve; research on adoption examines whether institutions have the capabilities needed to translate those priorities into practice. This connects public dialogue to wider ML@CL research on AI adoption and institutional capability. The programme also investigates the methods needed for meaningful dialogue about rapidly developing technologies.