---
type: source
title: "Democratic AI is Possible: The Democracy Levels Framework Shows How It Might Work"
author: "CIP researchers"
url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09222
date: 2024-11-01
domain: ai-alignment
secondary_domains: [mechanisms, collective-intelligence]
format: paper
status: unprocessed
priority: medium
tags: [democratic-AI, governance, framework, levels, pluralistic-alignment, ICML-2025]
---

## Content

Accepted to ICML 2025 position paper track. Proposes a tiered milestone structure toward meaningfully democratic AI systems.

The Democracy Levels framework:
- Defines progression markers toward democratic AI governance
- Establishes legitimacy criteria for organizational AI decisions
- Enables evaluation of democratization efforts
- References Meta's Community Forums and Anthropic's Collective Constitutional AI as real-world examples

Framework goals:
- Substantively pluralistic approaches
- Human-centered design
- Participatory governance
- Public-interest alignment

Associated tools and resources at democracylevels.org.

Note: Full paper content not fully accessible. Summary based on abstract and search results.

## Agent Notes
**Why this matters:** Provides a maturity model for democratic AI governance — useful for evaluating where different initiatives (CIP, Tang's RLCF, Meta Forums) sit on the spectrum. Complements our pluralistic alignment claims.

**What surprised me:** Acceptance at ICML 2025 signals the ML community is taking democratic alignment seriously enough for a top venue. This is institutional legitimation.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Specific level definitions not accessible in the abstract. Need full paper for operational detail.

**KB connections:**
- [[democratic alignment assemblies produce constitutions as effective as expert-designed ones]] — the framework provides maturity levels for evaluating such efforts
- [[pluralistic alignment must accommodate irreducibly diverse values simultaneously]] — the levels framework operationalizes this goal
- [[community-centred norm elicitation surfaces alignment targets materially different from developer-specified rules]] — early levels of the framework

**Extraction hints:** The level definitions themselves (if accessible) would be a valuable claim. The ICML acceptance is evidence for institutional legitimation of democratic alignment.

**Context:** Position paper at ICML 2025. Represents emerging thinking, not established consensus.

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)
PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[pluralistic alignment must accommodate irreducibly diverse values simultaneously rather than converging on a single aligned state]]
WHY ARCHIVED: Provides a structured framework for evaluating democratic AI maturity — useful for positioning our own approach
EXTRACTION HINT: The level definitions are the key extraction target if full paper becomes accessible. The ICML acceptance itself is evidence worth noting.
