Policy Briefs and Reports

Deliberative technologies are software tools that help create large-scale dialogue among participants. This article outlines the experience of testing four of these tools—Crowdsmart, Pol.is, Talk to the City, and Deliberation.io—with a group of student volunteers to understand their function and effectiveness, and to identify digital facilitation strategies. The paper concludes with recommendations to make deliberative tools more accessible in the future to enable collective decision-making. Common Good AI, a US-based nonprofit organization, created this programme to support its mission to foster inclusive civic engagement and social cohesion. The organization aims to transform how communities find common ground and solve problems together.

This paper explores the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), as an emerging tool to address the proliferation of online toxic speech. The research focuses on two key applications of LLMs: hate speech classification and detection, and response generation, specifically the use of LLMs for creating counterspeech. While LLMs show significant advances in detecting hate speech through various models, including supervised, unsupervised, and GenAI-based approaches, the paper notes crucial limitations. These include the difficulty in processing the nuance and context of online communication, understanding implicit hate speech, and the significant issue of models learning and amplifying human biases present in training data. The paper reviews efforts to develop AI-powered counterspeech tools, including challenges in generating human-like, constructive responses that adequately engage with specific hateful content. The paper suggests that LLMs show promise in developing counterspeech tools, and closes with a set of recommendations for technology developers and governments to guide the ethical development and deployment of LLMs in addressing online harms.