# Democratic AI is Possible. The Democracy Levels Framework Shows How It Might Work

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09222 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09222/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Scaling Participation in Modular AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07812/) (2026)
- [Botender: Supporting Communities in Collaboratively Designing AI Agents through Case-Based Provocations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25492/) (2025)
- [Position: Align AI to Our Aspirations, Not Our Flaws](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13755/) (2026)
- [PolicyPad: Collaborative Prototyping of LLM Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19680/) (2025)
- [AI of the People, by the People, for the People: A Social Choice Approach to Collective Control of Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16291/) (2026)
- [AI Pluralism and the Worlds It Misses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16167/) (2026)
- [An Investigation of the NeurIPS and ICML 2025 Position Tracks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16894/) (2026)
- [From Certain Doom to Survival: Agent-Driven Self-Governance in LLM Agent Societies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22600/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This position paper argues that effectively "democratizing AI" requires democratic governance and alignment of AI, and that this is particularly valuable for decisions with systemic societal impacts. Initial steps -- such as Meta's Community Forums and Anthropic's Collective Constitutional AI -- have illustrated a promising direction, where democratic processes could be used to meaningfully improve public involvement and trust in critical decisions. To more concretely explore what increasingly democratic AI might look like, we provide a "Democracy Levels" framework and associated tools that: (i) define milestones toward meaningfully democratic AI, which is also crucial for substantively pluralistic, human-centered, participatory, and public-interest AI, (ii) can help guide organizations seeking to increase the legitimacy of their decisions on difficult AI governance and alignment questions, and (iii) support the evaluation of such efforts.