OpenAI has announced a new program that will award ten $100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow. The company is seeking to fund individuals, teams and organizations to develop proof-of-concepts for a “democratic process” that could answer questions about guardrails for AI. The company wants to learn from these experiments, it says, and use them as the basis for a more global — and more ambitious — process going forward. The grants, furnished by OpenAI’s nonprofit organization, OpenAI hopes to establish a process reflecting the Platonic ideal of democracy: a “broadly representative” group of people exchanging opinions, engaging in “deliberate” discussions, and ultimately deciding on an outcome via a transparent decision-making process.
OpenAI says it is seeking to foster innovation in processes, as it believes that decisions about how AI behaves should be shaped by diverse perspectives reflecting the public interest. The company hopes that the experiments will explore decision-relevant questions and build novel democratic tools that can more directly inform decisions in the future. The primary objective of this grant is to improve democratic methods to govern AI behavior. Ideally, OpenAI says, the process will help to answer questions like “Under what conditions should AI systems condemn or criticize public figures, given different opinions across groups regarding those figures?” and “How should disputed views be represented in AI outputs?”
Teams can apply starting today, and the deadline is June 24 at 9 p.m. Once the application period closes, OpenAI will select ten successful grant recipients. Recipients will have to showcase a concept involving at least 500 participants, publish a public report on their findings by October 20 and open-source the code behind their work.
The announcement post implies that the grant program is entirely divorced from OpenAI’s commercial interests. However, given OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s recent criticisms of proposed AI regulation in the EU, the timing seems conspicuous. Altman recently appeared in front of the U.S. Senate Congressional Committee, where he advocated for a very specific flavor of AI regulation that’d have a minimal effect of OpenAI’s technology as it exists today.
Despite this, the grant program is an interesting direction to take AI policymaking. OpenAI hopes to establish a process reflecting the Platonic ideal of democracy: a “broadly representative” group of people exchanging opinions, engaging in “deliberate” discussions, and ultimately deciding on an outcome via a transparent decision-making process. The company wants to learn from these experiments and use them as the basis for a more global and ambitious process going forward.
It will be interesting to see what sort of ideas for democratic processes emerge and which applicants OpenAI ends up choosing. The company is seeking to foster innovation in processes and believes that decisions about how AI behaves should be shaped by diverse perspectives reflecting the public interest. Ultimately, OpenAI hopes that this grant program will help to establish democratic processes for overseeing superintelligence.