For what uses, in what contexts and with what level of faithfulness is it helpful or appropriate to use simulations, and what are the philosophical, moral, and political implications?

This paper propose a novel research agenda focusing on ‘utopian’ democratization efforts with formal and computational methods as well as with artificial intelligence – this agenda is labelled ‘Artificial Utopia’. Artificial Utopias provide safe testing grounds for new political ideas and economi...

Several have explored versions of this idea, under the keywords ‘AI-as-representative’ (Collins, 2023), ‘voting avatars’ (Grandi, 2018), and ‘virtual democracy’ (Kahng et al., 2019), ‘plurals’ (Ashkinaze et al., 2024) and ‘simulated deliberative democracy’ (Leike, 2023).

Proposes using imitation learning on large language models trained on recorded deliberative democracy sessions to answer value-laden questions at scale. The approach involves recording human ‘mini-publics’ deliberating complex value questions with AI assistance, then training models to simulate t...