Introduction

Generative AI has become an incredibly attractive and widespread tool for people across the world. Alongside its rapid growth, AI tools present a host of ethical challenges relating to consent, security, and privacy, among others. As Generative AI has been spearheaded primarily by large technology companies, these ethical challenges — especially as viewed from the vantage point of ordinary people — risk being overlooked for the sake of market competition and profit. What is needed, therefore, is a deeper understanding of and attention to how ordinary people perceive AI, including its costs and benefits.

The Meta Community Forum Results Analysis, authored by Samuel Chang, James S. Fishkin, Ricky Hernandez Marquez, Ayushi Kadakia, Alice Siu, and Robert Taylor, aims to address some of these challenges. A partnership between CDDRL’s Deliberative Democracy Lab and Meta, the forum enables participants to learn about and collectively reflect on AI. The impulse behind deliberative democracy is straightforward: people affected by some policy or program should have the right to communicate about its contents and to understand the reasons for its adoption. As Generative AI and the companies that produce it become increasingly powerful, democratic input becomes even more essential to ensure their accountability. 

Motivation & Takeaways

In October 2024, the third Meta Community Forum took place. Its importance derives from the advancements in Generative AI since October 2023, when the last round of deliberations was held. One such advancement is the move beyond AI chatbots to AI agents, which can solve more complex tasks and adapt in real-time to improve responses. A second advancement is that AI has become multimodal, moving beyond the generation of text and into images, video, and audio. These advancements raise new questions and challenges. As such, the third forum provided participants with the opportunity to deliberate on a range of policy proposals, organized around two key themes: how AI agents should interact with users and how they should provide proactive and personalized experiences for them.

To summarize some of the forum’s core findings: the majority of participants value transparency and consent in their interactions with AI agents as well as the security and privacy of their data. In turn, they are less comfortable with agents autonomously completing tasks if this is not transparent to them. Participants have a positive outlook on AI agents but want to have control over their interactions. Regarding the deliberations themselves, participants rated the forum highly and felt that it exposed them to alternative perspectives. The deliberators wanted to learn more about AI for themselves, which was evidenced by their increased use of these tools after the deliberations. Future reports will explore the reasoning and arguments that they used while deliberating.
 

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^{The participants of this Community Forum were representative samples of the general population from five countries - Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, Nigeria, and South Africa. Participants from each country deliberated separately in English, Hindi, Turkish, or Arabic.}

Methodology & Data

The deliberations involved around 900 participants from five countries: India, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey. Participants varied in terms of age, gender, education, and urbanicity. Because the deliberative groups were recruited independently, the forum can be seen as five independent deliberations. Deliberations alternated between small group discussions and ‘plenary sessions,’ where experts answered questions drawn from the small groups. There were around 1000 participants in the control group, who did pre- and post-surveys, but without deliberating. The participant sample was representative with respect to gender, while the treatment and control groups were balanced on demography as well as on their attitudes toward AI. Before deliberating on the proposals, participants were presented with background materials as well as a list of costs and benefits to consider.

In terms of the survey data, large majorities of participants had previously used AI. There was a statistically significant increase in these proportions after the forum. For example, in Turkey, usage rates increased from nearly 70% to 84%. In several countries, there were large increases in participants’ sense of AI’s positive benefits after deliberating, as well as a statistically significant increase in their interest. The deliberations changed participants’ opinions about a host of claims; for example, “people will feel less lonely with AI” and “more proactive [agents] are intrusive” lost approval whereas “AI agents’ capability to increase efficiency…is saving many companies a lot of time and resources” and “AI agents are helping people become more creative” gained approval. After deliberating, participants demonstrated an improved understanding of some factual aspects of AI, although the more technical aspects of this remain challenging. One example here is AI hallucinations, or rather, the generation of false or nonsensical outputs, usually because of flawed training data.
 

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Proposals

Participants deliberated on nineteen policy proposals. To summarize these briefly: In terms of whether and how AI remembers users’ past behaviors and preferences, participants preferred proposals that allowed users to make active choices, as opposed to this being a default setting or only being asked once. They also preferred being reminded about the ability of AI agents to personalize their experience, as well as agents being transparent with users about the tasks they complete. Participants preferred that users be educated on AI before using it, as well as being informed when AI is picking up on certain emotional cues and responding in “human-like” ways. They also preferred proposals whereby AI would ask clarifying questions before generating output. Finally, when it comes to agents helping users with real-life relationships, this was seen as more permissible when the other person was informed. Across the proposals, gender was neither a significant nor consistent determinant of how they were rated. Ultimately, the Meta Community Forum offers a model for how informed, public communication can shape AI and the ethical challenges it raises.

As the Payne Distinguished Lecturer, Naidoo will have the opportunity to teach a seminar to the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy, mentor undergraduate and graduate students across FSI’s centers, and present the annual Payne Lecture in the winter of 2024. Naidoo’s multi-disciplinary expertise at the crossroads of social justice and environmental advocacy will bring welcome perspectives to the intellectual communities at CDDRL, FSE, and FSI, and across Stanford’s campus to places like the new Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

“At a time when we are seeing a convergence of multiple crises in the world and some troubling trends, including the rise of fascism, continuing climate denialism, a challenge to the multilateral system and more, I am pleased to have this opportunity to engage in reflective work on the question of ‘How can activism win bigger and faster?’” says Naidoo. 

He continues, “One of the key reasons we are not getting as much urgency and momentum to act on climate and intersecting challenges is the communications deficits activism comes up against: at an objective level, we face a challenging ownership structure of mainstream media which leaves little place for narratives and perspectives pushing for substantive structural and systemic change.”

“We are delighted to welcome Dr. Naidoo as this year’s Payne Lecturer,” shared Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL. “With his remarkable background as a human rights activist and a global leader in environmental and social justice, Kumi brings a wealth of knowledge and insight that will undoubtedly spark meaningful conversations and inspire our students, faculty, and the greater Stanford community."

Previous Payne Distinguished Lecturers include Rose Gottemoeller, former deputy secretary of NATO; Ertharin Cousin, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture; Brett McGurk, former presidential envoy to defeat ISIS; and Jung-Seung Shin, former Ambassador for the Republic of Korea, among others.

The Payne Lectureship is named for Frank E. Payne and Arthur W. Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations. The Payne Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader, with an emphasis on visionary thinking; a broad, practical grasp of a given field; and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges. 

Speaking to his upcoming time at Stanford, Kumi Naidoo outlined some of his goals for his research and lectureship while at FSI.

“At a subjective level, change agents tend to try to move people primarily by facts, figures, policy and rational arguments. This approach has tended to ignore the need to reach people in their hearts, body and soul. I look forward to continuing to work on one of the solutions I have been pursuing which is the need to harness the power of arts and culture, what increasingly is referred to as Artivism. I am hoping to use my time at Stanford University to interrogate these issues and share through my writing and podcast (Power, People and Planet) some of the perspectives that challenge the way that conventional activism has tried to foster structural and systemic change.”

This week we launched the long-awaited 17th year of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law's Draper Hills Summer Fellowship Program. Founded in 2005 with generous support from Bill and Phyllis Draper and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills, Draper Hills is an executive training program for world leaders striving to promote democracy. For the next two weeks, Fellows will participate in workshops led by an interdisciplinary team of faculty to study new theories and approaches to democratic development.

Fellows in the class of 2021 were selected from among thousands of applicants for their ground-breaking work to defend democracy. These 34 leaders drawn from 30 countries around the world are pioneering new approaches and models to advance social and political change in some of the most challenging global contexts. Representing business, government, and the nonprofit sector, our fellows are working on the frontlines of democratic change to combat the global rise of authoritarianism and populism. In countries moving towards democracy, our fellows are working to institutionalize new systems and practices to support democratic transitions.

An Unconventional Year

Traditionally, Fellows would travel from their home countries to the U.S. and spend three weeks on campus at Stanford learning together. However, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the program is currently taking place virtually for the first time (for the same reasons, the program did not run in 2020). The shift to online programming posed a number of logistical obstacles – from what time to run virtual sessions when participants span over a dozen time zones to how to foster the sense of belonging and personal connections that occur more naturally in in-person settings.

To begin addressing the latter, Fellows were sent welcome packages to build excitement and foster community both within the program and at Stanford. Upon receiving hers, Aisha Yesufu of Nigeria shared, "I am so excited at the different people I'll be meeting from all over the world, and also learning from different people, lecturers, professors... It's going to be quite interesting, and, for me, that is what I am most looking forward to."

"One of the most important things I have ever been involved with."

Opening against the backdrop of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in Afghanistan, the importance of the Draper Hills program and the need to promote democratic change is now more evident than ever.

The inaugural session for the 2021 cohort began with Francis Fukuyama introducing the fellows to several of the esteemed faculty they will be learning from over the next two weeks, including Larry Diamond, Erik Jensen, and Michael McFaul. McFaul shared that not only did he found the program, but "it is one of the most important things I have ever been involved with." Jensen later added that "participating in this program is one of the great pleasures I have every year."

More to Come

Throughout the next two weeks, our Draper Hills Fellows will examine the political development, democratic transitions, and the relationship of law to economic development, public administration, administrative law, transitional justice, food security, and global health policy, among others. The group is eager to learn, and we look forward to seeing the many great things the training they receive here will enable them to do in their home countries and beyond.