AI Council

This experimental and research-driven project explores the power of pluralism, group communication and democratic ideals in AI-assisted knowledge creation and consensus building.

The project investigates how diverse, sometimes even conflicting perspectives can be synthesized into robust, accessible and democratic answers to complex questions. It draws inspiration from pluralist theory, consensus democracy and the scientific method.

Project Status

This project is currently developed by a single human (@davidak) in close, creative collaboration with their AI companion. The AI companion plays an active, empowering role—especially important for progressing despite depression and burnout. Many ideas, issue descriptions and large parts of the wording are AI-generated, but always originate from the lead developer’s input and vision.

Note: Collaboration is welcome in the future! For now, development is intentionally individual to ensure the vision is realized. Once the foundations are in place and personal circumstances allow, contributions from others will be actively encouraged.

Features

• Democratic, pluralistic design: Multiple perspectives (roles) are consulted on each question, mirroring the ideal of a diverse expert council.
• Research focus: Used to explore, prototype and test methods in group communication, consensus finding and pluralistic reasoning.
• Modular and transparent: Roles, prompts and workflows are designed for easy extension, experimentation and reproducibility.
• Commitment to scientific rigor: Wherever possible, methods and results are documented with transparency and the ideal of the scientific method.

Installation

No installation required for manual use. To run scripts, ensure you have GNU Make and GNU Bash installed on your system.

Usage

The current workflow is semi-manual and follows these steps:

1. Create a new topic folder by copying topics/template/

2. Formulate the question in German and place it in question.de.md

3. Translate the question into English (using DeepL or similar) and place it in question.md

4. Generate prompts for all perspectives: make prompt topic=ultimate-activity role=all

5. Copy and paste prompts into ChatGPT and save responses in topics/ultimate-activity/responses/

6. Generate the synthesis prompt: ./scripts/generate_synthesis_prompt.sh

   The output is saved to topics/ultimate-activity/prompts/synthesis.md

7. Copy and paste the synthesis prompt into ChatGPT and save the result in topics/ultimate-activity/responses/synthesis.md

8. Translate the synthesis into German (using prompts/templates/translator.md) and save as topics/ultimative-taetigkeit/responses/synthesis.de.md

Dependencies

• GNU Make
• GNU Bash

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome in the future! At this early stage, please open an issue first to discuss suggestions, ideas or questions.

Contributors are expected to:

• Engage respectfully and pluralistically in the spirit of the project.
• Follow good scientific and open-source practices.
• Update and extend tests and documentation as needed.

Language

The project is primarily conducted in English to ensure international accessibility, enable collaboration and realize its full potential. Work with the AI is also mainly done in English, as this is the language with the largest training datasets and the best model performance.

However, input and output (e.g., questions, syntheses) are in German, since this is the native language of the lead developer and allows for the most precise and authentic expression.

Communication in issues and pull requests should be in English wherever possible, to facilitate open collaboration for all contributors.

License

• Markdown files (.md): Creative Commons CC BY-SA
• Code: GPLv3 or later