Beyond Mutual Incomprehension: The Frontier of AI-Mediated Communication and Consensus-Building Technology

Using AI to collect, summarize, and classify large volumes of opinions is already becoming technically feasible. Mechanisms for gathering tens of thousands of citizen proposals, and implementations where AI organizes the points of discussion at municipal citizen assemblies, are starting to take shape. Yet a deep gap remains between "gathering a large volume of voices" and "building consensus with legitimacy."

This session brings together researchers and practitioners at the frontier of AI-mediated communication and consensus-building technology, each presenting, at high resolution, what is "already possible" and what "remains impossible" in their respective fields. Rather than a lineup of demos, the goal is to share a cross-disciplinary research agenda.

The discussion starts from three current vantage points: (1) technology that extracts trustworthy opinions and important minority viewpoints from a large volume of input, aiming for aggregation unswayed by vocal or majority influence; (2) technology that uses LLMs to transform the format of information and dialogue, supporting understanding between people and between people and AI; and (3) the obstacles that have emerged from socially implementing citizen dialogue and consensus-building infrastructure in municipalities and political parties.

Building on this, the session takes up shared unresolved problems: the absence of metrics for good deliberation or good consensus, which stalls the feedback loop for technical improvement; who decides, and how, that a minority opinion is "important"; how far AI can go, beyond summarization and classification, in "translating" between people whose positions and values are fundamentally different; and, when AI mediates the formation of consensus, whose consensus is it — and where is the line between that and manipulation?

Attendees, technologists especially, will leave with a "map of unresolved problems in digital democracy" — where the next challenges lie, and in what order they might be tackled. Putting that into words and sharing it is the aim of this session.