The GovLab | Policy Synth: Using Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Collective Intelligence

ProjectsPolicy Synth: Using Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Collective Intelligence

Policy Synth: Using Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Collective Intelligence

Exploring how AI can accelerate and improve the Smarter Crowdsourcing process to enable us to solve public problems more rapidly.

Background

In an era characterized by rapid societal changes and complex challenges, institutions' traditional methods of problem-solving in the public sector are increasingly proving inadequate. The potential for artificial intelligence to enhance the performance of groups of people has been a topic of great interest among scholars and practitioners of collective intelligence. Though many AI toolkits exist, they too often are not fitted to the needs of institutions and policymakers. Policy Synth with Smarter Crowdsourcing is a new approach to problem solving that utilizes AI to synthesize the findings from engagements together with large-scaled automated web research to develop evidence-based solutions and policies.

Partners

Citizens Foundation

Description

In collaboration with Citizens Foundation, The GovLab is developing a novel problem solving method that combines the collective wisdom of human experts and the computational power of AI agents to enhance and scale up public problem-solving processes.

The approach combines Smarter Crowdsourcing -- which is designed to channel the collective intelligence of those with expertise about a problem into actionable solutions through crowdsourcing -- with an innovative AI toolkit called Policy Synth with the aim of making the Smarter Crowdsourcing problem-solving approach both more scalable, more effective and more efficient. Policy Synth is crafted using a human-centric approach, recognizing that AI is a tool to enhance human intelligence and creativity, not replace it.

Results & Impact

In June 2024, The GovLab released a report, Using Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Collective Intelligence, which introduced a set of practical tools and methods that institutions can use to engage groups in solving public problems using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and collective intelligence (CI).

Co-authored with Citizens Foundation, the report describes a case study comparing solutions to a complex policy problem generated using artificial intelligence to those developed through expert crowdsourcing. The case study demonstrates how generative AI can make participatory problem-solving with human participants more effective because the tools make it possible to translate ideas into implementable proposals more quickly than human participation alone.